Apple of Eden
by rosethatgrewfromconrete
Summary: Does the child pay for the sins of the father? At what price? Post-Hogwarts with altered HBP & DH.
1. Prologue

**Prologue:**

**_And the LORD passed by before him, and proclaimed: 'The LORD, the LORD, God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth; keeping mercy unto the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin; and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children's children, unto the third and unto the fourth generation. – Exodus 34:6-7_**

** September 1996**

"Like father, like son," the redhead boy sneered, throwing a glower to the blond boy behind them, venom dripping from the acerbic condemnation of the boy. Between the words, she heard the implications and allegations slandered against the boy whose hands were stained by the blood of his father's crimes; the boy that was burdened by his father's boulder, enslaved to this world by the infamy and notoriety of his father, obscured by his father's shadow. "Death Eater," the redhead denounced disgustedly, spitting the foul label from his tongue.

The brunette glanced over to the accused and she couldn't assimilate the brand he had been given by the redhead to the boy before her. He was the boy blindly led in the darkness from the beginning, misguided and manipulated, ignorant to the fate he was pursuing. He was the lamb led to the slaughter without seeing the sacrificial table. He was the boy that believed he had no choices and continued to stumble in the darkness.

"The son doesn't have to pay for the father's crimes," she angrily spat at the redhead.

**_Fathers are not to be executed for the children, nor are children to be executed for the fathers; every person will be executed for his own sin. – Deuteronomy 24:16_**

**June 2006**

Tumultuously falling, agonizing waltz of silvery footprints that trickle down the soft slope of her cheek, her dark lashes dripping and fluttering against the dark bruises sunken beneath rose-tinted, melting chocolate orbs obscured by the glistening, hazy film of unbidden tears.

_Little ones, when considering love and fear, for these are the essential essence of all things in this world and the next, remember my words to you because a child should not pay for the father's sins._

_Fear leads to suffering; remember that before you ever must fall victim to it to learn from your mistakes; trust me when I warn you of the consequences of fear. This does not imply that you should never be afraid, little ones, because that's not the definition of fear. Bravery is having the strength and will to presevere in times of loneliness, struggle, desperation, darkness, death, loss, and confusion when you are uncertain of the future, and that uncertainty of the future is the root of all fear. But little ones, fear is selfish at its heart. It is greed, avarice, tyranny, dictatorship, power and it is manipulative of the mind and heart and deceiving to the eyes and ears. It is seductive. _

_But a long time ago, there was a little boy, easily deceived with crafted lies and ignorant and impressionable of the world that he allowed his vision to be distorted into certain hues of the rainbow, and this little boy was so very afraid of many things. He was afraid of failure, of legacies, of birthrights, of heirs, of fathers, of rejecting his choice, of having no choice, of following his father's footsteps, of being outcast, of being rejected, of being friendless, of being a traitor to his family, of being a servant, of being a killer, of committing atrocities, of being condemned, of death, of powerful dark wizards, of telling truths, of secrets discovered, of darkness, of monsters under the bed, of the light, of the depths of the oceans, of the cliffs, and of so many things more that his whole life from childhood to his last days were consumed by fear. This little boy followed his father's shadow into the darkest of rooms and the little boy disappeared into the depths of the abyss. The little boy was raised for the slaughter because all along, the son had been paying for the father's crimes, until the boy accepted the crown of thorns and his hands were just as stained as his father's. And this little boy, misguided and lost, paid for the transgressions of the father as his own, an heirloom passed generation to generation, to be condemned for the sins of the child, twisted by the hands of the father, who was twisted by the hands of his father, becoming the family legacy so that every little boy of this little family paid for the sins of the forefathers. Every little boy too afraid to choose another path, too afraid to be disowned, to be outcast, to be denounced, to atone for the crimes of his father and to divorce himself from the depravity of his father._

_But little ones, love is powerful, love is selfless; remember that it is unconditional and infinite. Love is of the gods that the ancients worship and embodying as the universe that birthed us and the ancestors we come from and deeper than the oceans, farther than the moon, higher than the sun and it knows no bounds, colors or time. Love is hope and forgiveness and acceptance. It saves and it illuminates._

_Little ones, love because in this life, you will be judged, condemned, burdened, and weighed down by all the crimes I've committed and the sins of my father. Love because you will hear of the crimes and sins of our family, your ancestors have taken part in and the ones they remained silent about as they witnessed them, and I can apologize and atone for my mistakes but I could never atone for all the generations laid to rot. But you don't have to suffer at the hands of their crimes and follow in their footsteps because there is hope that you will be nothing like me. Love because there is so much to be forgiven and far too much to judge. Love because the child doesn't have to pay for the sins of the father._

And the mother delicately tucked away the letter because the contents were far too heavy for a young child to understand now: for a son to understand his father's wisdom, for a daughter to grasp her father's confession, for children to comprehend the gravity of their father's fate, for little kids to see the vision of an adult.

**I know it starts off with religious references and there will be other religious references later but it is not meant to be propaganda for any religion, nor do I mean to offend for any future religious references later. Personally, I do not affiliate or identify with any organized religion.**

**I am no expert in prison so please excuse the errors in my depiction of how prison is run. I'm merely basing it from watching "Locked Up" and some research and what I've heard from those who have had experiences behind bars (none whom have served such lengthy or severe sentences as Draco).**

**AN: This story twists HBP & DH. Draco is still a Death Eater in Sixth Year with his task to kill Dumbledore, Katie Bell gets cursed, and Ron poisoned but Hermione gives him an education of his blindness—eventually they start dating, despite his crimes, secretly. Dumbledore dies June 1997. Hermione does not return for her Seventh Year, instead she's helping Harry and Ron with the horcuxes, sneaking to see Draco, and finds out she's pregnant in November 1997 and stops helping to go into hiding. She gives birth to a son in July 1998. Shortly after Battle of Hogwarts, Draco is arrested for attempted assassination and a slew of other crimes. His trial begins August 1998 (on bail) and he is convicted for his part in Dumbledore's death. He begins his ten year sentence February 14, 1999 in protective solitary custody. Azkaban has been reformed: no more Dementors and it now runs like an American prison system.**


	2. Chapter 1

**Chapter 1: **

**February 14, 1999**

The arrogant, defiant tilt of his chin remains as he stands degraded and humiliated before the Aurors processing the incoming inmates of Azkaban. He's deprived of any stitch of clothing, stripped bare to his ass cheeks, placed on display for security measures with scrutinizing eyes disgustedly thrown to the twisted and marred ebony scar upon his left forearm. The façade of security drops the moment he's standing far too long still naked, their gaze raking over the condemned, dehumanizing them by branding them with numbers to identify—a mere statistic to be released in the next year to inform the public of crime rates. They deny the inmates to shield the most intimate parts under the scrutiny. They are turned and rotated like a slave auction. He clenches his fists so the veins in his forearms protrude from his flesh and holds them at his side as he twists and turns for them like meat at the butchery and his steely gaze is unforgiving and bitter, hardened and harsh. The officers demanded them to drop down and squat and spread their ass cheeks. He bites his tongue as he abides, glowering at them as he stands shoulder to shoulder with several other inmates.

Her forehead presses against the tile of the shower, a thin papery layer of flesh obscuring her glistening caramel orbs from the world, trickling tears intertwining with the stream of water from above, her curls have plastered themselves to her back and wrapped around her ribcage. Her nails dig into the soft flesh of her sides leaving crescent bites as she attempts to hold together the fabric of her heart that has been torn into shreds with his conviction, the absence of a father to her young son, and the abandonment of a partner.

A strangled sob cracks through her lips as she slips down to her bum, pulling her knees to her chest, cradling herself because everything within her feels as if it has shattered and her bare hands are piecing together the broken shards that have sliced her hands until her sanguine blood runs thickly.

She's so afraid. She's a single mother to a little boy that will grow up with an incarcerated father. She's abandoned and facing all the odds. Her son is susceptible to everything society says he will be condemned to: prison, drop out, addiction, alcohol abuse, teen pregnancy, early death. She's afraid she's not strong enough to prevent her little boy from falling victim. She's afraid she won't be able to save him. She's afraid, so very afraid. Afraid of the questions a little boy will ask of his father, a son to his mother for the crimes of his father, and she is afraid if she can answer them so her son understands, forgives and accepts, absolves and does not commit himself. And any ounce of courage she once had from everything she faced alongside the Boy Who Lived disappears as she faces the world with a son and an imprisoned father of her child.

The mask he wears of defiance to the officers as they escort him and herd him through the intake process is but a mask. He omits the fear and anxiety that have settled deep into his bones the moment he kissed his son's crown through salty tears, his hand brushing through the boy's soft locks, murmuring his love for him and when he softly collapsed above his lover, the mother of his child, his lips at her ear, whispering his love and apologies, the soft kiss to her jaw and earlobe and then her lips and forehead, her arms wrapping around him, clinging to him as their chests lay against another, limbs tangled in the sheets. He's afraid of the influence of his absence will have on his young son, the wilting possibility of his lover finding solace with another, of being encaged like an animal for many years, of forgetting life outside this, of loosing the two that reside with the torn halves of his soul and heart, of the unknown. He's afraid of adjusting to this life and loosing any concept of life outside, of forgetting, of remembering, of his son paying for his crimes, and he's so very afraid.

He's escorted to his cell with a rolled up mattress in hand and a bag of his necessities clenched in his hand. His life has been reduced to mobility, without a home, without a name, without his own personal effects, and he's just a number within a system at the hands of the conductor. They stripped him of his black suit tailored for him, his Slytherin ring, his black Italian leather loafers, his wand, and his expensive watch, all stored within a bag for him to collect upon his release. His other possessions sit in the closest of his bedroom of his parent's home, inevitable to wither away, and his pictures will gather dust, his presence will fade from the walls of his childhood home though it will be haunted by young man, merely a boy. And they will become the possessions of a ghost and they will no longer be his when he returns because they will be shadows of a time long since passed, memories of the dead and he will truly be wearing clothing hidden for years in the prison that housed him that will truly not be his either, and he will have a son that will not truly be his apart from flesh and blood because they will have no memories outside of the walls that encaged him. He will have nothing because they even took his name and gave him a number that will hold no worth when he is released because it will no longer be his, and they have taken his freedom and that will always be absent from him, and he will have nothing apart from the body he occupies, but that will be tarnished and worn from them.

She drowns in the soft silk of his dress shirt that dangles down to her mid thigh, her fingers running over the soft fabrics of his shirts that hang in the closet, eyes roaming the sea of clothing that he's worn in all her memories, clothes she's never seen him wear before, his shoes shining and tucked away, belts and ties, his watches, his socks, his dirty laundry, freshly folded laundry that has yet to be tucked away. She wonders as she whirls around in the closet, touching every possession of his, if a widow feels this way when she ambles through her home, stumbling upon her deceased husband's artifacts, the ruins of a person, the objects left behind, misplaced and scattered. She leaves the socks thrown in the drawer, not pairing them together, she leaves the dirty clothes, leaves the folded ones, leaves the shoes that have been shifted from the position, leaves everything as he left it because she can't ruffle the memory of him and pretend that he had always left everything perfect in his haste to leave. She wants to live with a ghost by pretending every morning when she walks in that he's merely forgotten again to put away his clothes because she doesn't have the strength to forget and she fears she will. When she retreats from the sanctuary of his most assembled shrine, she glances to his side of the bed, sheets pulled back and the pillow ruffled and she leaves it.

When she wanders down the halls of his family home, she finds traces of him seeping from the very foundation of the home from the stray book he had left on a mahogany table, to the empty glass sitting on the marble counter, the pictures of his childhood and the recently captured memories, and she bitter-sweetly smiles at them. When she gently pushes the door of her son's nursery, she shakily exhales at the overwhelming nostalgia that washes over her with every intricate detail he had taken to set up the room from painting the soft swirls of the galaxies of the universe above on the ceiling to the history carved into the walls adorned with the greatest heroes of ancient Greece to the fictional heroes of books, stories unraveling for the small infant, to the toys carefully chosen for the young boy from the blocks to the teddy bear, to the cradle, and the little blonde wispy haired son wrapped in a cocoon of ivory cotton covering his kicking legs to his fists, head to toe.

A barren cell, white washed, void. No window, only artificial light to illuminate the small rectangle cell he will be housed in for his entire stay. A single cot of hard metal, unforgiving and unyielding, for him to be haunted by his worst fears in his sleep. A lone shelf to hold the few possessions he holds. A cramped desk to scrawl letters to those he's been ostracized from: to a son far too young to understand, to the waiting single mother, to the mother who's lost both husband and son to Azkaban within months. Layers of brick painted over in an abyss of white to surround him and the concrete floor beneath his feet. A metal toilet thrown in, not sheltered by privacy, but nothing is private anymore; his letters will be read by other eyes, words dissected apart for hidden meanings, his cell subject to searches at the whim of the officers, items riffled through to search for contraband, his body inspected for weapons, stripped to his boxers in raids, nude in showers shared with others, constantly followed and watched. He already feels the suffocation of the cell, the desolation of it all, and the oppression.

A lone tear trickles down his face as he glances around, hoping to canvas the walls with the ingrained images of his son upon them and her face. He longs to gouge the white from the walls to paint them vividly with the images of the Great Hall when he was young and naïve, the Quidditch pitch, her cradling their son as he latches to his mother's breast suckling from it, the rising sun, the sunset, the falling of snow in Hogsmeade, her smile, his mother reading him a story tucked beside him in the night, the rose gardens of his childhood home, a roaring fire as she reads a book, a squirming child as he bounces back slightly on his heels to soothe his son, the moon and its stars twinkling. And he realizes they've stripped him of sentimental things that remind him of his greatest joys in this life, another thing they've taken of him and from him. And though there are countless others housed in these same designed cells, he's truly alone because they live in their own world, far from his own until the fractions of seconds they are released to shower and stretch their legs once in a while. It's only him imprisoned here, truly, in this godforsaken cage.

She cradles the young child to her chest, his tiny hands against her collarbone, his feet at her ribcage, and she gently rocks in the rocking chair of oak. Her wand lays flat against a forgotten dresser, a strange contraption murmurs out a sad tune, the crying of a piano trickling out beneath a soft spoken voice, apologizing, confessing, atoning, consoling, loving, guilty, offering, giving, heartbroken, regretting, accepting, forgiving, understanding. And she cleaves to the son she holds, the son that this soft spoken voice is whispering to from the father that has been taken from his child, and she hopes that the boy will recognize the voice of his father from deep within the womb and the soft caresses as an infant so that when he is old enough to truly visit him, he will know his father. It will be the only thing the boy truly has of his father, memories ingrained since his infancy because the boy will not know that his father labored over the colors and shapes of the artwork upon his walls, over the letters he's scrawled to give to his son when he is older, over the hours spent assembling the crib, the devoted father in the night to soothe the disturbed infant needing attention, or the memories deprived of a father and son as the little boy grows. (*)

That night, Draco Malfoy shivers from the thin sheet that he has draped over himself, laying on his side as he stiffly remains on the rigid mattress facing the wall as he blankly stares at the grout between the bricks. He's been swallowed by the darkness when the lights were quickly confiscated and taken from his grasp to analyze the layers of brick to divert his mind from drowning in the loneliness. The helplessness embraces him in the night when he gently runs his hand over the wrinkles of the sheet to find the warmth of her, itching to entangle in her curls or pull her close, his fingers ghosting over the swell of her belly from her pregnancy with their son, and he finds no presence of her; he releases a strangled choking sound from his lips when he desperately searches the bed for her until his fingers painfully find the wall. His ears strain to hear the soft cries of his son in the night and he only hears the silence that echoes; footprints dance down his face as he drowns in the silence.

Coddled within the warmth of his blanket, the baby boy sleeps soundly within the confines of his father's side of the bed, his mother curled up near him, nose buried in the father's pillow, drowning in the father's worn silk bottoms from the night before and a ridiculous sized t-shirt from the recesses of the father's closet. Her hair fans out like a halo around her as she sleeps, dried tears upon her cheeks, her hand resting upon the belly of her son, her other hand gently resting upon the slight swell of her belly that she has no knowledge of yet.

*** I imagined the lullaby to be reminiscent of Eminem's "Mockingbird" if you wanted to have some essence of the song playing in the background of the nursery.**

** - Gonzales**


	3. Chapter 2

**Chapter 2: **

**February 28, 1999**

A thin, impenetrable, translucent barrier separated the convict from his visitor, a slight glimmer of a soft pink and lavender hues rippling across its expanse as her fingers spread apart on the glass-like wall. A wilting gaze etched into the bruises beneath her glistening orbs, drowning in tears that threatened to spill down her cheeks, the ivory embracing the chocolate was stained with the shadow of crimson, and the barrier failed to distort her heartbreak of his sanguine uniform, the large ebony block numbers branded, or the mirrored bruises and the forlorn weariness carved into his flesh that stretched tightly against his cheekbones, jarringly inhumane.

She digs her nails into her ribs, holding together the shards that these guards have striped her of when they degraded her as they searched her for contraband only to discover that she would have no contact anyway; they spread her legs and searched far too high, they prodded and lingered, and repeated. She can only imagine what he's suffered, what abuse he has received, what they've done to dehumanize him if she was merely his whore.

Contritely, he averts his gaze down to his hands that remain lifeless on the metal surface of the table before him, as freezing and unwelcoming as the bed he doesn't sleep on. His nails dig into the flesh of his palm, drawing blood.

She swallows her saliva to soothe her parched throat, though it's more that she had been waiting for his comfort or anger or sympathy or something when he looked into her eyes to see what they had done to her, only for nothing to arrive, and she has no idea how to tell him something so intimate with the prying eyes and ears. She coarsely whispers his name, but he doesn't glance up or acknowledge her.

"I have something to tell you."

His heart halts.

_He glances to her, standing before him, drowning in a large shirt that stretches down to her thighs, her arms wrapped around her stomach just beneath her breasts, her voice shattering and fearful, silver footprints upon her cheeks. She glances down, away from him as she shakily exhales._

_"I-I'm," she brokenly trails off, quivering and stumbling. "I'm not trying to…I wasn't trying…I didn't mean to…I had no plan to…You don't have to….I'm not expecting you to…Don't…I'm…Fuck," she softly murmurs. "You don't have to wife me," she whispers, almost inaudibly._

_"What?" His brows are furrowed, drawn together. _

_ "I have a life inside of me," she murmurs, obscuring her sight as hot tears roll down her cheeks._

_His heart halts. _

"Our son will have another sibling," she whispers and her fingers wilt until they spread across her belly, "In October."

"Another," he croaks somberly, "Life," his voice softens, wistful, "within the womb." His lips tug into a shadow of a smile.

_"A life," he hoarsely whispers, cracking over the words he utters. His heart sinking at the notion of a life growing within her womb, "A life," he utters, glancing to her belly that cradles the life._

_"A life," she brokenly admits, tears streaming down incessantly, "A baby." She chokes on her sobs. "Your seed that has flourished into a rose."_

_His knees nearly buckle at her confession of bluntness._

"A rose," he murmurs and a bittersweet smile graces her face as she nods shyly.

"Draco," she pleads desperately, pulling him from his image of her belly swollen, cradling a life he created within her, and the little hands of their son against the unborn.

_"We're still kids," she laments, "Do you know the odds are against us to raise this baby together? Of me being a single mother? Of this baby having no father in the future? Of this baby being a teen parent? Or what of the future we can provide this baby? Will it be stable? Will it be beneficial? Will it condemn this baby? We're only kids having a kid."_

"Isn't it enough that we had a son to raise with his father behind bars for his childhood? Do we need to condemn another child to this upbringing?" She pauses, tears streaming down. "I'm twenty with no education and a single mother to a beautiful baby boy. I can't even support my son or myself alone. I'm living in my baby daddy's house with his mother when he's serving ten years. I shouldn't be bringing another baby that I can't provide for into this world right now. I'm still a kid with a kid, do I need another?"

_"Are you suggesting abortion?" His voice is meek and fragile._

_"Wouldn't it be more merciful? More loving? Less selfish?"_

_A solitary traitorous tear trickles down his cheek as he acquiesces. "For the baby," he consents._

"Do you remember sitting in that muggle clinic," he pleads, "Remember the ambience, the heaviness of the guilt, the constriction of your lungs, the doubt lingering, the little boy with platinum hair you imagined, the little laugh you thought you heard, you remember? Remember our fingers intertwined as we both glanced down to the life within your belly, obscured from our sight but we knew it existed? Remember crying and grieving? Remember leaving? Remember the tears that rolled down your cheeks when you cradled the little boy? Remember his birth, his kicks against my hands, his eyes, his lips, his fingers and toes, his heartbeat?"

"Did you forget the goodbye kiss to your son's forehead? Did you forget your condemnation? Did you forget the length of your sentence? Did your forget the Dark Mark upon your flesh? Did you forget the son you've abandoned? Did you forget the little boy that will grow up without you? Did you forget what you went through when your father was sentenced back in school," she angrily hisses. "Are you willing to have another child to pay for your crimes?" She roughly wipes away her tears. "For a little boy to become just like Daddy," she mocks.

"Do whatever the fuck you want," he spits, "Aren't I just the sperm donor anyway?" His face is stoic, void of the anguish at her tirade but his words are harsh and bitter.

Angrily, she shoves away from the wall and table. "Fuck you," she seethes.

"Isn't that how you got here, Granger?"

"How could I forget," she cackles manically, "I'm the Mudblood whore."

She spins on her heel away from him.

"He'll hate you. Loathe you. Condemn you," she warns, "He'll never love you. Never forgive you." Her words, like daggers, twist the serrated edge deep into the flesh.

The bones of his knuckles shatter as his fist collides with the wall, flesh tears and sanguine stains the white painted brick. "Fuck."

She flinches but refuses to turn around to glance back to him, instead stoic as she waits for the guard to open the door to release her.

Later that night, she shatters the glass of every picture frame until her fingertips are stained with crimson, drowning in the warmth of the thick liquid. The shards scattered across the floor of her bedroom so that every step is embedded with glass so that the soles of her feet are bathed in her blood.

"Hermione," the soft gasp of the elder blonde as she ghosts over the carnage and ruins, her tousled locks poking through the crack of the door as her hand gently pushed it further to reveal the scene of the mother of her grandson crying, bloodied and frantic, with the pictures of her son cracked. With a delicate wave of her wand, the elder undoes the damage inflicted, healing the gashes of the fingers and soles of the brunette and the shards of glass of her pictures. "Darling," she murmurs as she tiptoes to the crouched brunette that rocks herself, her arms wrapped around her knees that have drawn into her chest, oblivious to the wreckage having been cleaned, and the elder gently crouches down beside her and lovingly pulls her into her embrace allowing the younger to burrow her face into the crook of her neck as she weeps as she soothingly rubs her lower back to calm the girl.

An anguished sob racks through her frail shoulders as she cries into the elder's neck and her heart splinters. She's angry, she's grieving, she's lonely, she's abandoned, she's heartbroken, she's shattered, and she's crumbling into pieces.

"I know, I know," the elder whispers. "Let it all out, let it go."

"I hate him," the brunette spews bitterly. But it's laced with her confession that she loves him.

"He left you with a beautiful baby boy to raise, I know," it's sorrowful and broken, but it's understanding of a mother to mother both with the fathers of their children having been incarcerated. "You're feeling all alone. And you're worried for this little boy and the man he'll become without his father to guide him. I know, I know. He promised to be there for this baby. He cradled this child lovingly and told you he'd be there for his son. He promised you things he can't keep. I know, I know."

"He's left me with two," the younger softly admits, fragilely and it cracks the understanding of the elder.

"To bring another baby into this," the elder mourns, "Isn't it enough to have a little boy already facing the reality of having to be raised with his father behind bars?"

"I can't," and it's unclear if she's referring to abortion or bringing this child into a future of a fatherless childhood.

The elder tangled her fingers in the scalp of the younger, bringing her closer as she grieved with the younger mother. "I'm so sorry."

**Please don't bombard me with your views on abortion. To each his own, isn't it? **


	4. Chapter 3

**Chapter 3:**

**March 2, 1999**

Shakily, her finger traces the rim of the porcelain teacup, intricately hand-painted in soft hues of lilac. A dull throb resounds in her skull, her tear ducks barren and parched, the footprints of her tears still wet on her cheeks, glistening caramel gaze downcast upon the amber liquid, long since cold.

Raspy and tender, "To be a mother and make this decision is far harder than merely a young girl with a bright future ahead, and to be a mother to a little boy whose father will miss his childhood for his sins makes the decision even harder, Mia." Even the beautiful Narcissa Malfoy crumbles, unbidden tears dancing down. But the elder offered no judgment, no resentment, no bitterness if the younger chose to, nor did she attempt to sway her for a child her son, taken from her, had fathered because that was selfish of her when the choice lay in the hands of the mother.

"I look at him," the younger hoarsely murmured, "into the face of my son and I wonder how could I let him slip through my fingers."

The elder gives a bitter smile that carves into her.

"Mothers are selfless," the younger whispers, chanting the mantra because she has betrayed it once with her firstborn.

"It is not selfless for a mother to shelter life within her womb and breathe life into a being this mother created, nor is it selfless for this mother to love this child unconditionally to the point that she would tear the planets from their orbit for this child," the elder murmurs despite her previous stance to not sway her, the words merely pour out from mother to mother of two different generations but somehow so similar in the aftermaths of wars.

"Look at the world I'd bring him into."

"Have you seen it's beauty," the elder counters gently, "How the sun continues to rise when it is drowned by the night, how love can survive in the ruins of hatred."

A smile cracks on the younger's face.

_Her fingers and palms spread across the expanse of her swollen belly to cradle the life within as she gently murmurs to the child._

_"And I'm going to paint the solar systems on the back of your hands, so you have to learn the entire universe before you can say, 'Oh I know that like the back of my hand.' And you're going to learn that in this life will hit you, hard, in the face wait for you to get back up just so it can kick you in the stomach. But getting the wind knocked out of you is the only way to remind your lungs how much they like the taste of air. There is hurt, here, that cannot be fixed by band-aids because no matter how wide you spread your fingers, your hands will always be too small to catch all the pain you want to heal, believe me, I've tried. I want you to look at the world through the underside of a glass bottom boat, to look through a microscope at the galaxies that exist on the pinpoint of a human mind. I want you to understand that there will be days when you open your hands to catch and end up with blisters and bruises, when you step out of the phone booth and try to fly and the very people you want to save are the ones stepping on your cape, and when your rain boots are filled up with rain in disappointment because these are the days you have should be the most thankful for. Because little one, there is nothing more beautiful than the way the ocean refuses to stop kissing the shore line, no matter how many times it is sent away. For if you never experienced pain and ugliness, how could you ever appreciate the beauty of this world." (*)_

_A flutter against her palm is felt and a brilliant smile graces her face._

_"Just ask your father, little one."_

Thick traitorous tears tumultuously trickle down the slope of his cheek. The drowning silence is suffocating as he kneels before his bed, palms pressed together in prayer, offering words to a God he's never known but has read about as being merciful and forgiving.

_"You are not an assassin, Draco." It's soft and gentle, somber and sullen and so very reminiscent to the words whispered by a brunette with untamed curls._

_"How do you know," he indignantly denounces, he flushes when he hears how childish it sounds and he quickly adds, "I've done things that would shock you." It's meant to drown out her whispers in his ear, to remind her of the sins he has committed that she has turned a blind eye to. "You don't know what I've done!" And her voice is gone._

_"You almost killed Katie Bell and Ronald Weasley," his tone is weary and tender, "You have been trying with increasing desperation to kill me all year. Forgive me, Draco, but these attempts are feeble, I cannot help but questions if your heart has been truly in them." He pauses. "Whether your loyalties lie with Voldemort or someone else?" There's a familiar twinkle in his eye intertwined with an inexplicable weariness._

_Defiantly, he pulls back his sleeve to reveal the monstrosity of ebony upon his flesh, refuting the elder's claims._

_"You were young, merely a boy," the elder refutes gently, "Long before she ever showed you another perspective of the world, oh yes, you didn't think I was oblivious to her sudden interest in muggle studies—her intent interest in pursuing the littlest details on muggle genocides."_

_The boy raises his wand to the man at his mercy._

_"You don't think I noticed the solemnness of her after Katie Bell, her grades slipping briefly, and then her sudden interest in religious texts and literature on forgiveness," he continues, unthreatened by the child._

_"She's a Mudblood," the boy spits, vainly trying to deny the elder, but the elder twistedly smiles as he softly reprimands the boy, "Don't use that derogative, Draco." His eyes twinkle behind the crescent glasses._

_"She's brilliant, a challenge intellectually," the elder murmurs, "A large heart for all, forgiving and accepting. Beautiful, isn't she?" But he doesn't broach the subject, leaving it as a mere notion._

_Contritely, the boy averts his gaze from the knowing eyes._

_"Don't you want to know if I'm alone," the boy taunts, his voice hoarse._

_"How?" It's forced but it holds his curiosity._

_"Vanishing cabinet." It's lacking his arrogance and pride._

_"Ingenious," the elder trails off, and his features soften, "She hasn't been taking any precautions to prevent pregnancy." His tone is almost reprimanding for the carelessness. "A child is a tantalizing idea to two children in war, promising of unconditional love and hope," the elder whispers, "But you understand the consequences of this child—being brought into a world at war and for you as a father if this child shall be discovered, the Dark Lord is not forgiving for indiscretions."_

_The boy nearly chokes on the elder's worry and knowledge of the situation._

_"Where do your loyalties lay, Draco?"_

_"Stop," the boy spews, unbidden tears glistening in his eyes._

_"I once knew a boy years ago who made all the wrong choices," the elder ignores the boy, "Let me help you, Draco."_

_"I don't want your help," the boy grits out through his teeth and a choked sob. "Don't you see! I have to do it! I have to!" His features disfigure his face into the ugly masks of desperation and fear and anguish._

_"You'll break her heart," the elder whispers, "And what if she's pregnant, what of the child? What will you tell the child when it is grown and asks of your sins? How will you explain, Draco?" He pauses. "Let me help you."_

_The boy's wand lowers fractionally and his voice drops to a whisper, "I've got to kill you or he'll kill me."_

_Clarity graces the elder's face, and then sadness, "You won't abandon her, or the child she may carry."_

_"You don't know anything," the boy denies futilely._

_"Let me help you, Draco. I can protect her, hide her far away from the war, hide her so the Dark Lord will never find her, and I can have your mother follow her."_

_The boy's wand trembles._

_"You can't even protect your students," the boy taunts with a sneer, "A legion of Death Eaters have infiltrated your school."_

_"To exterminate her, no doubt, or have you forgotten where their loyalties lie," the elder counters. "They'll kill her, without mercy, without hesitation, with child if it may, for no spawn of her will breathe."_

_The boy's pale face turns ghastly, his heart halting._

His lips murmur of his hope that she will carry this child to term because it's his only consolation of peace in war.

_Both sets of hand, one feminine and one masculine, cradled the swollen belly of the brunette._

_"Koios, after the Greek Titan of intelligence and farsight" the mother whispers, "The Northern Pole, pillar of the North, and the Axis of the Heavens and Earth." The father smiles softly at the last label attached to the Titan, for his child is surely descended from the heavens._

_"Scorpius, after Gaia's scorpion, the unconquerable creature that Orion failed to defeat, the very Orion that set out to slay all the beasts of the Earth," the father whispered. _

_ "Koios Scorpius," the father murmurs and the baby greets his father's palms. _

_"Koi," she amends with a teasing smile, "like the Japanese fish."_

Two sets of hands, one slightly wrinkling and another youthful; rest upon her belly, touching the fabric of her dress not her flesh. And the elder leans in to brush her lips against the younger's crown, feather-light caress of her appreciation, and she retracts her hand with a dazzling smile and glistening tears. Evident in her eyes, the elder basks in the pride of her son for granting her another grandchild in his absence to fill the void of him and for her to bathe in her love as a grandmother, but there's an affinity for this young woman that was chosen to bare this child to term without the father of this child. Her whispered, "Thank you, Mia," cannot encompass her gratitude.

***Excerpt from "If I Should Have a Daughter" – Sarah Kay **


	5. Chapter 4

**Chapter 4:**

**May 28, 1999**

The soft pink lips of the infant pulled up into a horseshoe shape, evidently jubilant as his grandmother spun the child to see his father behind the barrier—the now familiar sanguine garb with the branded numerals of his identification—with the child eliciting an excited squeak of delight as his grandmother whispered in his ear, "Look at Daddy, Koi."

"He's so happy," the younger brunette murmured, her hands resting on her swollen belly, a smile mirroring the inmate she's come to visit, "Just couldn't wait to see Daddy." Her cheeks are fuller and her bags have faded that once marred her face, but together the parents of this little boy are juxtaposing; he's haggard and lanky, pale and pasty, dark bruises haunt his eyes.

"He's so much bigger," he wistfully comments but it's laced with his grieving for his absence in his son's childhood. Suddenly, it's far more evident that he truly will miss out on witnessing his son grow, he'll hold onto the snippets of his son's life he will be a part of, the notion of ten years is far more tangible than it ever had been and his son will be the breathing proof of the seconds that will be taken from him. "Is he walking," his voice is hoarse and broken.

"Just crawling, but always on the move," the younger wistfully comments, raking her fingers through the soft strands of blond atop her son's head, oblivious to the envy of the inmate and his pain at his realization that his relief is premature because he will miss his son's first steps, among everything else. "Everywhere he can, crawling around the house, giving the house-elves heart attacks when he ventures."

"Brave though," the elder comments, "Little Gryffindor already, Draco dear. But walking is soon, just a few more months and he'll waddling around with us chasing after him," she glances to the brunette, "And you'll be waddling right after him with that belly of yours," a laugh following.

His laugh is hollow and forced because he's slowly realizing that they truly are ostracized—she has memories without him, and his mother is filling his void with his children, and his son will only remember him from their visits to Azkaban—and even after he's served his debt to society for his crimes, he can never rewind time to venture back to these moments and no amount of time with his son thereafter will create memories of childhood that a parent treasures or a son will reminisce upon when he is frail and old. For a second, it's so very tantalizing to let them slip through his fingers because it would be far less painful than having to bear witness to everything that has been taken from him, it's far easier to love from afar, and it's far easier to handle heartbreak without reopening the wounds.

**October 21, 1999**

Withering away, the inmate hardly resembled the former arrogant Slytherin Prince, but rather some crude derision—his spine projecting from the flesh of his back and his ribcage jutting out, his flesh waxy and rivaling the complexion of the deceased, his skull nearly visible beneath the skin that clung to his bones, shaved to near baldness his infamous platinum locks were gone.

He remains deaf to the doctors whispered concerns: _Depression… Suicide Watch._

Legs spread, supported at the knee by the two elder generations of mothers, the younger brunette with damp curls plastered to her forehead, gasping and panting through grunts and cries of agony, chin tucked into her chest, pushing as the doctor counts.

His plastic spork pushes around the slops in a tedious circle—and he's completely oblivious to the fact that she is in labor, giving birth to his daughter. The disgusting slobs of his nutrition sit in the tray, and would be sent back to the kitchens again without a scrap passing between his lips, and would most likely incur the wrath of the medical center for his defiance followed by the threat of attaching him to an intravenous drip.

Piling the blocks according to color, the elder man with laugh lines and thinning tufts of auburn locks, played with the young platinum haired little boy in the waiting room, erecting towers and forts of simple construction and the occasional multi-stacked layers of blocks over the simple block over block approach, and Mr. Granger softly smiled at his grandson. The very child that resembled the angels painted in religious artwork on the ceilings of churches with his little bow lips and his nose that remind the man so very much of a little baby bundled in pink many years earlier that he cradled, except the soft silver of his eyes. His heart clenches because he's painfully reminded that his daughter's son had been fathered by a man he had heard so many vile things about throughout her childhood at school and then he witnessed his daughter struggle through his conviction for his crimes, and then he remembers this little boy that has been thrown into this nightmare with a father branded and condemned as he is and a mother that loves far too much. For the tears he has tasted for his daughter, he lovingly glances to this little boy she created and he chooses to ignore the boy's paternity because that afflicts far too many wounds.

The heels of his palms digging into his jade gaze, rounded glasses resting on his lap, the weary Harry Potter averts his gaze from the grandfather and grandson for their privacy.

_His features have been disfigured, engorged, hopefully beyond recognition, but the silver gaze lands upon him and he knows he hasn't fooled his school rival, Draco Malfoy, the boy's father has his grip on his neck, thumb digging on his pulse. But the boy looks frantic, desperately searching his face for something, scouring the bodies brought in from the snatchers, and there's worry laced with anxiety._

_"Well, Draco? Is it Harry Potter?" His words slither into the boy's ears and he visibly stiffens, but the boy quickly leans forward, his eyes still darting between the faces of Ron and Harry, his lips moving without uttering sounds—upon closer inspection, he repeatedly murmured a name of a frizzy haired witch. As he leans closer, a gold chain is evident; at the end of the chain is a familiar contraption of an hourglass that twirls around and around. Only later upon reflection would the boy deduce that the golden chain was his best friend's time-turner._

_"I can't be sure," the blonde whispers, and his eyes stop darting and he shuts his eyes in relief._

The young man heaves a sigh and he lifts his head to glance to the little boy that resembles his best friend and the boy that saved his life.

_He had never been blind to notice the mornings she would return at dawn after leaving in the shadows of the night, or the days she might slither away from them to check on a lead. He certainly had not been blind the day he found a cloak, far too large for herself and far too expensive for Ron, and he knew she was involved with some boy that she chose to keep secret and he respected her wishes._

_She had left hastily in the middle of the day, eyes glistening with tears and he allowed her to leave, knowing she would seek comfort in the arms of the boy she was seeing. He knew how hard this war and secrecy and isolation was, so he let her go, covering her tracks when Ron asked where she had gone to, and he lied again for her._

_And then he had found the muggle pregnancy test in the trash, and he was thankful that Ron was oblivious to its meaning and easily bought his lies. He felt his heart drop because he knew that whatever she chose, he needed to let her do, even if she left him on this crusade because she had a child to consider and she had already done so much for him._

_She stumbled into the house late at night, the early hours of the morning, nearing dawn, and she was crying and he hugged her, never telling her that he knew because he knew there were secrets for a reason. And she lied when she said her parents were sick and she needed to go away to them, and he accepted her lies because he was her best friend and she had been through so much. He kissed her forehead and promised her everything would be okay and she cried more and told him she was so very afraid and he held tighter to her. And he prayed that the father would be there for her, but in case he wasn't, he slipped a familiar coin into her pocket. _

He distinctly remembers the relief wash over Draco Malfoy that night at the Manor when he saw she wasn't captured with them, and he's never seen a man more grateful—not even the beggar when he receives.

He wanders back to his sixth year and he wonders if he could have deterred his path and maybe he could have seen what she had been trying to do all along. If he had interfered that night at the Astronomy Tower, maybe the son wouldn't be paying for the sins of the father, and the boy would be playing with his father watching, anxiously awaiting the birth of his daughter, or maybe he'd be in the room holding her hand as she delivered the baby and he'd bring in their son to meet his little sister. He wonders if he had seen earlier, long before he should have, if anything would be different now—if Malfoy wouldn't be rotting in a cell in Azkaban and if Hermione wasn't giving birth to another child of a convicted Death Eater and if somehow in another universe, the two would have married and happily had a plethora of children in a world not tarnished by the war.

Carrying the boy, the grandfather enters the room to find his daughter lazily smiling at his wife as she gently holds a pink bundle, and a blonde woman sitting beside his daughter as they hold hands, shedding tears together.

"Theia Cassiopeia," his daughter murmurs gesturing to the baby and his heart constricts because once again, this little baby is from the loins of a convicted man but she looks nothing like she could ever have come from a prison.

_Rubbing her belly, the young mother smiles through her tears as she holds the parchment, reading the scrawled cursive of the father of her daughter._

_He writes: Theia after the Titan of sight and the shining light of the clear blue sky, and who endowed gold, silver, and gems with their brilliance. She was the mother of the moon, sun, and dawn; fitting isn't it for my daughter? And Cassiopeia after the Queen, regardless of the Queen's vanity, she was beautiful._

**October 23, 1999**

_Drake,_

He recognized the familiar elegant loopy scrawl of Blaise Zabini.

_You have a daughter. She's beautiful even with her auburn curls that I already know will rival her mother's. But damn, twenty hours for her birth, bless Granger's soul for enduring that for little Theia Cassoiopeia, welcomed to this world October 21__st__._

The time and weight of his daughter had been censored with thick block black marks to etch out the numerals.

_Granger told me to tell you that she's decided her nickname will be Rose, but I'm baffled by this. Koi makes sense to me, but Rose for Theia Cassiopeia, where does that come from?_

He cracks a smile at the nickname.

**And before you ask why the time and weight had been censored, let's just assume that the prison didn't want the risk of an ex-Death Eater receiving some coded message- I know it's pretty common with prison gangs to use these kind of codes in innocent letters. **


	6. Chapter 5

**Chapter 5: **

** December 7, 1999**

_Thick, voluminous plumes of ash rise from the depths of the abyss, dark as blindness as they waft up in spirals reeling to the heavens, stretching their fingertips up to grasp the universe. Stacks of these clouds line the horizon as far as the eye extends._

_Nails dig painfully into the flesh of his wrist, carving into the bone, desperate scratches of claws etched into his milky skin, and she clings to him with her grip as a dying man struggling to heave air into his suffocating lungs. His fingers wrap around her wrist, their palms touching at the heel, tightly he holds to prevent her from falling as she dangles over the cliff, the harsh, belligerent ocean beneath with its jaws unhinged to swallow and consume her. Her chocolate curls flay in the bitter wind, whipping fiercely and violently at her face, smeared with ash and blood, her body thrown side to side, her knees ramming into the unforgiving jutting rocks that are bathed in the blood of her shins and knees. Her free hand, knuckles tearing through flesh expose the bones, claws at the crumbling dirt and rock and her bare toes itch the sharp edges of the earth. Flat on his belly, he strains to keep her from falling._

_"Don't let me slip," she brokenly pleads, hoarsely from her incessant yelling for mercy to the God she's never truly known, the fear on her lips tumbling off her tongue. Glistening with tears, she glances to him and murmurs to him but her words are lost in the tangle of the wind, stolen._

The inmate's whimper echoed in the silence of his cell.

_And he murmurs to the God he's never known before, praying that this God will be merciful because he cannot let her go in all essences._

Though her grandfather never served in the navy, nor did he ever touch ground on American soil, she has come to mourn− with others that have gathered here over names they have never uttered to the face of the man. She would have gone to the local cemetery but there are far too many surnames etched into the tombstones that are reminiscent to the very ones she lost in her war. She does not recognize that she has chosen a land and nation far from her own because it would be far too close to the heart to resemble the destruction laid by warfare, and this land far away has rarely been tarnished by this warfare—the land is far less scarred by war and man than her home.

Her fingertips trace the engraved names of the deceased entombed in the sunken ship, gliding across the ridges of the letters, over columns of names, some merely variations in initials or rank. Her eyes rake over the marble wall of deceased and the lost, more than she could ever reach if she reached up on her toes, stretching as far she could.

The moonlight trickles in from the oddly shaped windows and bathes her in the light, and she slowly slinks away from the wall back to the dock where she reaches into her pocket and pulls out a crumpled parchment into her hand, palm facing up but her fingers folded over to hold onto the scrap before she watches it fall into the depths of the ocean.

_Don't let me go, _had been scrawled upon the parchment in his scrawl.

Tears slipped down her cheeks as she contritely obscured her vision of the Pacific.

Her fingers laid down, parallel to the ocean and the parchment rested in her palm.

She was letting go, not of him, but of everything she was clinging to with his absence.

He was not the boy with slicked back hair, not the bully that spat hideous names, nor was he the boy that taunted her in the hallways, not the boy that pulled on her curls, not the pointed face boy that maliciously teased her, and he was not the ignorant boy raised in hate. She was letting that boy go. He was not the young man that bore the Dark Mark, not the one that sneered with disgust at his inferiors, not the one that conspired, not the one that was witness to atrocities. He was not the young man that didn't want any help, nor was he the one with the wand that trembled, or performed futile attempts to assassinate another. She was letting him go. He was not the one whose stomach churned at the images plastered before him of the genocides throughout history, he was not the one that contritely cried when he saw the countries branded for the genocides, he was not the one that ran his fingers through her blood before smearing her blood and his blood together into a crimson puddle, he was not the boy that cried in the empty bathroom, he was not the boy that hesitated, he was not the boy that learned to see. She was letting him go. He was not the boy that scoured the library for religious texts, he was not the boy intent to atone or be forgiven, and he was not the son that had stopped following his father's footsteps. She was letting him go. He was not the boy that held her close, not the one whose lips traced the shell of her ear, not the one that whispered confessions of adoration and gratitude, not the boy who made her heart skip a beat, not the boy that she felt butterflies when she saw him, not the boy that held her hand, not the boy whose lips brushed over her crown and brow. He was not the boy that cradled her to his chest, not the boy that she allowed to part her legs, nor was he the boy that fathered her son. She was letting him go. He was not the father that shed a tear when he saw his son pulled from her womb, he was not the father that brushed her lips through salty tears in the aftermath of his son's birth, he was not the father that spent sleepless nights beside his son's crib, nor was he the father that traced abstract patterns into his son's flesh as he laid the child over his chest with his son's ear over his heart as he murmured to the child his adoration. She was letting him go.

She tilted her hand until the parchment drifted down slowly, descending to its grave. For living in the past was crippling to the future. Her gaze lingers on the parchment as it descends down to the submerged ship beneath her feet because it is almost suffocating to let go of the past.

_"Draco, don't let me go," she screams, her toes lose their footing and she slides lower, his grip sliding against her skin—she's slipping between his fingers like grains of sand._

_Fear haunts his gaze as it lingers on her lips._

His eyelids peel back as he awakes to the dark cell, liquid sorrow runs down his cheeks as he pushes himself up to be supported by his palms that shake with the weight—as if truly sore from the nightmare. With the back of his hand, he wipes the sweat from his brow before dragging his hand over the nearly bald head, the blond so finely buzzed it barely exists. Like the rattling hiss, the drowning depth of iciness, the all-consuming weight of the weariness, the blinding oppression, the very ambience of the Dementors settles over his heart as it is strangled within his chest and he can hear it reverberating in his skull, and fear is truly crippling.

**December 10, 1999**

Her left palm presses against the barrier, a flurry of lavender and coral hues ripple from her contact, and his steel gaze settles on the absent diamond from her finger—though how could it be absent when it never had a presence. He likes to whimsically believe that had he never been convicted, he would have whisked her away in his arms and brought her to a chapel in the muggle world, given his name to her so it would roll off his tongue more fluently, and her finger would be adorned by a brilliant diamond that bonded her to him for all eternity because a son merely bonded them in blood, but marriage was something divine and intimate, it was of the soul.

Shattering, his eyes blinked and everything he had conjured of another universe—he understood the tragedy of Gatsby, his hand reaching incessantly for the fading green light across the Sound, his fingers nearly brushing the edge of her dock, and how dwelling on dreams and the past were suffocating and crippling and poisonous.

"I've been reading a lot," he murmurs, the words spilling from his tongue without thought, and perhaps it's the notion of Gatbsy prancing in his mind that sparks the comment.

"I know," she softly speaks, "You asked for a list of books to read in your last letter."

He nearly flushes with embarrassment for his redundancy.

"I chose _The Great Gatsby." _It's barely audible to her, but she visibly stiffens at the title; she knows the implications of the book, but more specifically Gatsby.

Any further comment he would have made in reference to his connection to Gatsby dies upon his tongue, though more accurately, it chokes in his throat, never having sound attached, and his ghostly heart recedes into the shadows.

"You should read _The Odyssey,_" she diverts the conversation, and she mentions the title merely because she hopes he will see how Penelope waited for her husband for ten years.

He nods solemnly, her words diluted through his thoughts that revolve around a lone hand reaching out in the night to a flickering jade jewel on the horizon.

**If you were wondering where Hermione was, she's at Pearl Harbor. **


	7. Chapter 6

**Chapter 6: **

**December 25, 1999 **

The ugly sneer: yellowed and crooked teeth crudely that rival the white washed tiled but stained from water leaks to the pipes and blood that never could be removed from the grout that surrounds them, spreads across the greasy inmate. "Mudblood pussy," he hisses, his hand drifting south, "Malfoy's whore," he venomously clarifies as he fucks his hand to emphasize his vulgarity, as if his dick in his hand wasn't enough to imply.

The back of his molars grate together, his jaw clenched tighter than a tunicate that a surgeon requires on the battlefield. And regardless of the bones protruding from his spine or his ribcage, he has never look more menacing or absolutely lethal—the silver of his gaze has diluted to steel, sharper than ice and frozen to the point it rivals zero kelvins, and a snarl rumbles in his throat, his knuckles strain from the fist he has made.

The witnesses glance between the two, the tension tangible and the electricity of the inevitable violence simmers.

His knuckles collide with the inmate's jaw sending him stumbling back. In a flurry of seconds, his head is rammed into the pipes of the shower, a sickening crack and crimson smears the floor and the tiling of the wall behind the pipes he has painfully encountered.

Guns drawn, riot and combat gear, face shields, the guards halt the fight—with a order for all witnesses to fall to their knees, hands raised in the air visible to them, and the blond slammed face first into the tile. He turns his cheek, smearing the blood across his flesh, and they yank his hands behind his back, handcuffing him with the freezing metal chains against his bare back, a knee into his lower back, painfully shoving him into the tile. His lips stretch away as he triumphantly and arrogantly smiles, his teeth coated in blood from the victim before he spits the salty rust flavor from his lips.

"Merry Christmas, motherfucker," he snidely proclaims.

"Merry Christmas," the mother coos to the infant coddled in silver, her fingers dancing over her daughter's belly that mirrors the milky expanse of snow outside the frosted window—the large panes stretching floor to ceiling and overlook the rose gardens—delicately crafted snowflakes still drifting down from the heavens. At the mother's feet, a little platinum haired boy, crazily disheveled, prances about his sister's nursery, a little figurine on a broomstick in his tight grasp, shaking the poor toy with his furious movements, merely in his diaper.

The little boy had left his bedroom door ajar, the soft twinkling sound of the absent father's lullaby to his son drifts into the room and it sounds far more despondent and forlorn than before. And the father's words to his little boy intertwine with the whirling ballerina that spins out a sorrowful twinkling tune.

And many years later, when the little boy is grown far from the days of walking in diapers throughout the house, he will listen to the little boy's little chest painted with intricate swirls of his name, and he will open it and out will pour his father's lullaby; and he will listen to the words.

_I remember back one year, Mummy wrapped up all the Christmas presents up and stuck them under the tree. I'll never forget that Christmas, I sat up the whole night crying because despite everything that your mama was telling me, I knew the verdict before it was ever delivered. I know that Christmas, Mummy tried to make it perfect because she knew there was a chance I wouldn't spend another one with you for a very long time. Through all of Mummy's laughs and smiles, I could see she wanted to cry, but you were too young to understand it all. Daddy said some things that he never meant to say to Mummy when it seemed like everything was falling apart, and it all happened so fast that neither one of us could grasp it. But Mummy took you for the night as you were screaming from all the noise. I spent the night alone with your present that been inspired when Mummy sung this lullaby to you one night as she rocked you, something about a mockingbird. (*)_

But for now, the child remained oblivious to this part of the father's words that trickled in from his bedroom, but the mother heard. She brushed a kiss to her daughter's brow, her tears dancing to her daughter's forehead before she gently cradled the child, rocking to the lullaby.

Haughtily, his chin tilts up as he is escorted to his cell with a stern reprimand and suspended visitation, three guards at his side, flocking him, and when he truly ruminates his discipline he realizes the gravity of it all—as if a handful of visits sporadically throughout the month if he were lucky to exceed four was hardly anything to the hours spent on lockdown, he was now deprived of the few minutes allotted for visitation. His chin lowered fractionally.

Though his eyes do not betray the overwhelming sense of panic, his heart is faltering and stuttering because he has no knowledge of how long this suspension will last—how much time will pass with his son not having seen him or what milestones will have glided past when it is lifted.

**December 31, 1999 **

The lone guard patrols outside the corridor of his cell, the constant vigil. But for more security measures, the camera lens is angled to watch his cell. The window in the door provides light and for the prying eyes.

The fire extinguisher on the ceiling has been attached into the ceiling so no part of it dangles down as a possible point to tie a noose for the inmate to commit suicide, nor are there any bed sheets to be torn into scraps to create the noose, and the bed lacks any bars as it lays upon the floor of the barren cell, to prevent any other attempts. He hasn't been provided a razor since his admission for fear of slit wrists, nor has he been given a mirror for fear of glass shards being used instead of the razor.

But he's never attempted any of these, nor has he considered them.

Instead, he sleeps for hours upon hours, restless and often haunted by nightmares, but he sleeps still because it's better than being interrogated and divulged by the doctors for any sign of mental instability. He won't admit that he sleeps because he wants to avoid this oppression and desolation, and for the few hours of dreamless nights, he will take the hours of nightmares—though some do not qualify as a nightmare to those outside of prison, but the memories of a life outside are equivalent to any terror when you're living in this institution.

Her head rests against the shoulder of Harry Potter as she laughs whole-heartedly at something Ron Weasley had said, her eyes glisten with happiness and surely laugh lines in old age will form from tonight. The trio reminisces over times spent in adolescence sneaking under an invisibility cloak and times spent managing mischief. They laugh and smile and hug, they tease and scold, and they are completely remembering the days of youth, spent over a Dark Lord, not of the trials of adulthood. They forget that she is a mother to a little boy and girl and they certainly forget who the father of her children are for the night.

They miss the chime of twilight, too engrossed in their childhood.

And she does not miss the feather light caress of his lips on hers from a year ago when everything was not as it is. Nor does she miss his presence for this night because it's like she's traveled back in time, rewinding the hands of the clock to when she was in school and he was the boy that ruthlessly teased her and he was of no consequence to her.

She passes out on her best friend's couch, the redhead slumped in the reclining chair snoring away and completely dead to the world, and the boy with glasses tucks a blanket over the brunette with frizzy curls and a blanket over the ginger before he slinks away to his bed after adding more wood to the fire and watching it blaze brighter.

The elder blonde will rock the baby girl to sleep in her arms for the night and she will read the little boy a story from a blank diary the child found, but she will weave a story of a little boy that had been born years before and had been named after a constellation in the night. She will kiss the boy's brow as he falls into sleep's embrace, reminiscent to when she kissed her son's brow before he entered the land of dreams as a child. And Narcissa Malfoy will kiss her granddaughter's nose when the clock strikes midnight, and for this brief second she will not be the mother that aborted her daughter, and her young son will be still in his crib and her husband will be pouring himself a glass in his study before retiring to bed.

At the stroke of midnight, he will be wide-awake and he will think of her lips and his mother's warmth and of their son's soft locks and of the daughter, whom he has never touched, let alone held.

***Inspired by a part in "Mockingbird" by Eminem—"I remember back one year when daddy had no money, Mommy wrapped the Christmas presents up and stuck 'em under the tree and said some of 'em were from me 'cause daddy couldn't buy 'em. I'll never forget that Christmas, I sat up the whole night crying 'cause daddy felt like a bum…" **


	8. Chapter 7

**Chapter 7:**

**January 19, 2000**

She croaks out his name, tears glistening in her eyes, drowning the soft cerulean because she nearly lost her son.

He bites his tongue from quickly offering her forlorn reassurance— he was not afraid to die. But he convinces himself that he holds the retort to prevent the medical staff restricting him again with suicide watch.

Her eyes scan his neck for discoloring, any sign of a necklace strung upon his throat—tighter than a choker—and she looks for the bruising from a noose, but upon its absence, she glances down to his wrists for the ridges of scars, the stitches pulling flesh together as it heals, but they are missing from his body.

Painfully he clears his throat, shifting in his seat tensely as he softly informs her, "It was malnutrition."

Dripping down her lashes, the tears fall.

"The food is bland," he dryly comments, attempting to obscure the truth, "Not even worthy of being fed to a snarling dog." His words lack the disgust at the slops served to him.

"Why didn't you eat from the canteen then?"

He can offer no more lies for she has cracked the surface with her mere question.

"The doctors said it was common for inmates to endure this loss of appetite," she murmurs, and she's trying to be delicate with something so infinitely intimate.

He flinches at her words.

"Sleeping all day," she continues tenderly, "is all a part of depression for inmates serving a lengthy sentence as yours."

She nearly expects the snapped denial of her son, but no spitting retort in haste is ever made.

A solitary tear trickles down his cheek.

_Long pointed cones of ebony atop the masked face, mask etched with swirling designs and slits over the mouth reminiscent to Hannibal Lector's, thick black cloaks descend to their feet, adorn the Death Eaters who have stoically assembled in rounded edge around the Dark Lord._

_A lone wicker melts as the flame strangles it._

_"Draco," the Dark Lord beckons._

_Divorced from his followers, the mother of the blond boy stands, chin tilted with poise, and she's silently witness to the affair she should not be allowed to attend, but she's the dutiful and obedient wife and mother and sister._

_He glides to the candle as the Dark Lord commands, but there's a slight falter in his step and only the mother catches it. For this moment, she nearly reaches out to her son and pulls him away from what he's about to do, but she's the subservient wife and she doesn't._

_The Dark Lord's hand flips the boy's hand over until his palm points to the ceiling as a lithe frame of a Death Eater steps forward, curved wand in hand._

_She murmurs the enchantment that casts a slithering snake from a skull upon the table beneath the feet of the candle._

_The mother drowns in the darkness of the spell for it extends its tendrils out to victims unmarred by it._

_And she flicks her wand again for wisps of crimson words written in Latin to appear before the boy._

_Another Death Eater emerges and his hand delicately holds a blade._

_The mother recognizes her husband and the knife. Her throat is far too parched to shout for the boy to run._

_The Death Eater proudly rests his hand upon the boy's shoulder before he takes the boy's hand from the Dark Lord._

_Together, the boy and his father chant the words of crimson as the Dark Lord chants some other cruel variation of the spell. When the last of the words have been uttered, the boy's father takes the tip of the blade and pierces the flesh of the boy's palm until blood seeps through, and then he drags the knife from the base of the boy's thumb to the edge of his hand. The father tilts his son's hand until droplets of his blood descend down to the candle and the serpent, a hiss emanating from both at contact._

_The hiss crawls up the mother's spine and she shivers._

_The father steps away from his son with a soft squeeze to the back of the boy's neck as the Dark Lord steps closer._

_The Dark Lord cranes his neck and beckons for the mother to approach her son. Her heels clack against the floor as she hesitantly approaches before she stands on the boy's left._

_"His sleeve, Narcissa," the Dark Lord gently whispers._

_With fumbling hands, the mother rolls the boy's sleeve up to his elbow. She nearly runs her fingers down the untarnished expanse before its depravity, and a part of her heart stutters when she realizes this flesh of her baby boy will be marred by an ugly disfiguration. She lifts her gaze from his flesh to his eyes and she sees the cold steel reflecting back. But there's something else ineffable for her to capture._

_Maybe it's because she catches a glimpse of her son when he was merely a boy, drowning in an overly large set of black robes, stick in hand as he casts conjured spells of large words jumbled together, yelling derogative terms to non-existent victims. But that boy disappears with a boy with slicked back hair spying through the sea of students at the platform to a little girl with wild curls and his eyes follow the girl until she stumbles into a boy frantically clutching unto a frog. The same boy whose ear is bent and twisted to listen to the words of her husband who tells the boy of how muggles burned ancestors at the stake and how these mudbloods exposed the purebloods to the muggles in the first place. The boy sneers at the girl with curls the following year upon the platform. And maybe because she sees these glimpses, she projects upon the boy her own regrets and fear._

_But there is some lingering specter in the boy's eyes that she can't name. Yet, there's an overwhelming sense of pride in the boy and it churns her stomach._

_"Cissy," the first Death Eater gently tears the mother from her son._

_The mother blinks back tears that have not fallen as her husband steps behind her, his filthy touch against her hips, and at that moment, she had not realized he was restraining her from their son._

_The boy kneels before the Dark Lord, left arm extended in offering to him, head bowed._

_The Dark Lord's wand descends to the boy's wrist, atop the boy's vein in the center of his wrist, and murmurs as a toxin runs through the vein, blackening it from within as the venom flows to his heart._

_With horror, the mother watches._

_The boy's face contorts—his jaw unhinged in a silent scream._

_Then the black ink carves into his flesh until crimson suffocates the ebony serpent and the skull._

_The boy's fingers twitch with seizures, the vein protruding from his flesh, and he continues to silently scream._

_Her husband's fingertips dig into her flesh as she muzzles herself._

_A lone tear falls from the boy when the monstrosity of the Dark Mark has been scarred into his flesh._

Her throat constricts because maybe it's not the child paying for the sins of the father, maybe it's the mother. For wasn't it Eve that bit into the forbidden fruit and introduced sin into the world, wasn't it Eve's son Cain that murdered his brother Abel because his mother had bestowed her sin upon him.

"You were just a boy," she softly laments. "A cross to bear far too much… the son to carry his father's and his own…Given a task that it was inevitable you would fail…Given a demand with a price far too high…and you were just a boy."

The boy makes no comment but he thickly swallows.

Her mouth moves—apologizing—but the sound does not reach his ears for their visit has expired.

**January 21, 2005**

_Koi and Rose,_

_I keep having this dream—you two have come to visit me._

_Koi you keep screaming that I'm making Mummy cry as she clings to your little hand. She won't even look up to my eyes to say good-bye._

_Rose you keep pleading that you don't want me to leave, but the guard's footsteps are approaching, and you're holding onto my hand, trying to pull me away with you._

_Koi, you keep telling me that I always make Mummy cry—that she stays up all night crying._

_Rose, you keep shouting that I'm not leaving because I'm yours._

_But the guard gets closer and I can hear him coming._

_And Mummy tells you that this is the last time, and you stop screaming at me to leave with you._

_Koi, you start yelling that Mummy's lying because I always say that this is the last good-bye._

_Rose covers her ears because she won't listen to what Koi is saying._

_The guard comes from behind and he wraps his arms around me, dragging me away back into the labyrinth of cells._

_Rose starts screaming that I'm leaving without a good-bye kiss._

_I blow you a kiss before I see from the corner of my eye the executioner at the chopping block._

_I send my love and I tell you to keep vigil over my heart and soul because I've left it with you. And I tell you that when I'm gone, don't mourn, but rejoice. Know that I'm looking down at you, smiling. (*)_

**January 21, 2000**

He blows two kisses to his children that night, tears streaming down to his lips.

*** This was inspired by Eminem's "When I'm Gone" – "I keep having this dream, I'm pushing Hailie on the swing. She keeps screaming she don't want me to sing. 'You're making Mommy cry, why? Why is Mommy crying?' Baby, Daddy ain't leaving no more. 'Daddy you're lying. You always say that. You always say this is the last time. But you ain't leaving no more, Daddy. You're mine.'"**

**And if you're wondering what canteen is: basically it's a store for inmates to purchase packaged snacks and drinks so like they can buy soda or things you might find in a vending machine, some top ramen etc...**


	9. Chapter 8

**Chapter 8: **

**February 7, 2000**

An angry cloud of smoke swirls out from her lips, a dangling cigarette between her index finger and thumb, her brows drawn tightly together to compliment her scowl. Her curls have been pulled back into a sloppy half-assed bun and the whole sight of her disheveled with her baggy sweats and an over-sized hoodie somehow contribute to the brewing fury.

"They just don't fucking understand that prison doesn't protect you from accumulating more convictions," her companion, an equally angry mother—slightly older and inked. "These fucking stunts can add more time to their sentence." She sounds well rehearsed with this life and maybe it shows in the bags beneath her eyes and the cigarette butts at her feet; but it offers no comfort to the little girl brought up in the suburbs in a middle class family. "It's a fucked up situation in prison. The fucking gangs hound them and they follow through in fear of retaliation against them and it's a fucking cycle. The fucking higher ups in the gangs pull the strings behind bars and everyone else is just a fucking puppet. It's fucking do or die, live or bleed." She pauses. "It's worse in there than the streets. They've got shanks made out of the fucking craziest shit and it's far more painful to be stabbed than shot up with a drive-by. Nobody is safe."

The brunette glances to the Latina—raven hair cropped short, wide hips, voluptuous, a worn smile—and to her little boy with a cute crooked grin and dimples, he's nearly old enough for kindergarten, and she can't help but see herself in a few years down the road in the same boat as her. Whereas the Latina looks strong and invincible because the streets have tried to stifle her and suffocate her long before now, she someone pulled through the cracks to make it here today, but she is not built for this survival, and nothing she ever managed to do with the Boy-Who-Lived can help her.

"His father," the Latina motions to her son, "had two felonies but he was going to get out, and then behind bars he got caught smuggling and the fucking three strike shit locked him up for life." There's no sorrow, just anger and bitterness.

She knows that she could never be in the Latina's shoes because she thinks ten years is a stretch, she can't imagine life.

"What the fuck is your baby daddy in for?" The question throws the brunette off for a second when she had never mentioned her being a mother.

"Felony," she shrugs, the cigarette settling between her lips again, and she doesn't elaborate but it's unnecessary because felonies are always colored and a familiarity with this life will fabricate grotesque scenarios.

"Gang shit," the Latina prods and the brunette nods slightly. She doesn't need to go into depth of his affiliation with a band of prejudice wizards because this Los Angeles native will have no comprehension of a foreign world to her.

She shakily exhales a puff of smoke, the words of nobody being safe echoing her skull as she ruminates over the safety of an ex-Death Eater that fathered a child with a mudblood in a prison festering with other convicted loyal Death Eaters.

"Fuck, mine nearly slit his wrists to get fucking out of the gang shit," the Latina murmurs angrily, "Didn't think protective custody would protect him. They just slit a rat's throat in protective custody."

Her heart falters at the admission.

**June 1, 2000**

Koi happily sits on his father's knee, crayon in his fist as he scribbles large loops of green onto paper and occasionally sprinkles a bit of blue for ringlets of hair on his mother's depiction to which his father chuckles at when he inquires the child if it's mummy.

Rose has her hands on her father's thigh using him for support as she watches her brother, bouncing slightly with her mouth wide open in delight, her hazel eyes sparkling as her father makes ridiculous faces—sticking his tongue out, crossing his eyes and any variation that he can contort his face into at his daughter.

She's merely watching, allowing her children's attention to be consumed by their absent father.

His skin is not as wallow as it had been, his face is filled out to his last days of Hogwarts and his spine does not protrude from his back so that she can see the ridges under the crimson uniform he wears. His hair has grown out a bit but it's still relatively short, not long enough to be slicked back. His arms and legs have added weight so it's not just bones and flesh. He looks healthy.

But some glimmer catches the light as he cranes his neck down for his son to whisper in his ear and she sees the scar—precise and small, just below his jugular.

"Draco," she immediately lunges from the chair, her finger tracing the scar, and his hand reaches out to pull her wandering hand away from the scar. "Draco," she sternly reprimands him to twist her hand out of his tight grip.

"It's nothing," he denies.

"Bullshit," she hisses.

"I said it was nothing," he angrily spits and their son drops the crayon, glancing between his mother and father as the little girl stops bouncing.

"When were you going to inform me you got attacked," she snaps, oblivious to her children.

"You aren't my wife," and she recoils from his retort.

"Da," the little boy squeaks out, pulling on his father's sleeve, and the father quickly turns his full attention to the boy after scooping his daughter up into his lap. The father buries his lips into the soft ringlets of blonde upon his daughter's head, feathering kisses over her, as his eyes intently watch his son, whose is far too engrossed drawing, and with each hand wrapped tightly around his children encaging them, the father ignores the brunette.

**June 20, 2000**

The brunette does not escort the two small children to this visit, instead an elder blonde takes her place with a soft smile to her son as the little boy runs into his father's awaiting arms and on bended knee. The father lifts the boy up into his embrace, glancing around for the familiar curls of an ex-Gryffindor and his brows furrow when he notes her absence.

Quickly, his son distracts him with building blocks and the two plop down on the floor to construct towers and castles. The grandmother elegantly kneels and helps support her granddaughter as they join the shared block building though the little girl holds hostage over a particular red block despite her father's attempts to get her to loosen her grasp.

With the children fixated on the blocks, his mother touches his hand softly and he glances up. "She was working on establishing conjugal visits for you," his mother whispers and he reddens at his mother mentioning this subject. "It was one thing for her to get you these family visits," she reprimands him, "And she was working so hard to get Mummy and Daddy visits." He averts his gaze from his mother, far too embarrassed to discuss this particular field. Loudly he clears his throat, signaling an end to this conversation.

**July 8, 2000**

His daughter happily uses his leg again for support as she bounces and his son sits upon his other, doodling again with intense concentration, his mother across the room giving him privacy.

"Koi," the father softly whispers, "Where is Mummy?"

"Ome," the boy answers without glancing over his shoulder to his father's dumbfounded expression.

"Why is Mummy home?"

The boy shrugs as his crayon surpasses the paper with his large broad strokes to color in the sky.

"She didn't think you wanted to see her," his mother answers, "after what you said."

"Said?"

"About her not being your wife," his mother clarifies and he heavily exhales, digging the heels of his palms into his eyes. "And you should have told her what happened, she was worried and frightened that next time, they wouldn't be intercepted and it wouldn't be a scar, but something far more sinister," she scolds him. Her voice softens, "She's completely terrified you won't come home whether it be at your hands or another."

She stabs the butt of the cigarette into the glass ashtray watching the burnt edges crumble off.

"He needs to be transferred," she urgently conveys to the auror with rounded glasses. "He nearly had his throat slit in protective custody. He's in a fucking prison festering with Death Eaters and they would do anything to fucking slit his throat for his betrayal."

Harry Potter sighs wearily. "Hermione, no other prison will take him, not with a felony and not for his affiliation, regardless of his betrayal because he still wears the Dark Mark."

"My children will loose their father if he stays." She omits that she will have lost him, but her best friend can see her own worry for him.

"They won't," he swears, but he hesitated to assure her with things he couldn't promise because there is a part of him that whispers they might.


	10. Chapter 9

**Chapter 9: **

** September 19, 2000**

She rakes a hand through her strands of distressed ringlets, nervously searching for gray hair though it's far too premature for it to appear but she feels old enough to have few errant strands. This last year has been unkind and she can't distinguish if him being in prison is the source of her haunting worry and fear or if it's merely being a mother at a young age that has been behind her stress and anxiety.

She notes her brow furrowed in her reflection because why the fuck is she even considering him a source of this worry because it's been since the summer when she stopped visiting him when he made it evident he didn't see what she was seeing with this relationship and she should only be concerned as far as his parental rights and him being a father to her children.

But fuck, she's twenty-one and she feels the weight of all the baggage she carries to the dating scene—mother of two with the father locked up and an ex-Death Eater and she's a washed up war heroine which seems a complete façade because she never was involved in any battle instead she was knocked up and in hiding, and everyone knows she hardly did anything in the war but still some fucked up journalist credited her with this title and nobody spoke up against it.

"Fuck," she mumbles, her eyes darting to the pictures tucked into the frame of the mirror and if adding to her baggage, she still has pictures of said father to her children hanging up in the mirror as if that doesn't complicate matters were she to invite some boy home with her. It exacerbates when her eyes catch one from her birthday celebrated with him: her face buried in the pillows of his bed with her bare back exposed as he showers soft kisses along her shoulder; and it'd be a completely different and more understandable if she had merely pictures of him with their son but she doesn't because these pictures are far more intimate: him beside her bare and heavily pregnant belly.

Down in the kitchen, the little boy bounces with excitement, holding onto his Daddy's letter to his Mummy that his grandmother had given him the special assignment of handing Mummy the letter with the present that Daddy had got for Mummy—though in all reality Draco had requested his mother get and wrap on his behalf. As his little sister held onto her grandmother's hands, waiting for her mother to come downstairs to be greeted with her presents from her children and her unofficial mother-in-law though that was in debate since she had not seen him in months.

Wrapped in silver paper, the rectangle velvet box held an oval emerald pendant wrapped in white gold behind that had been engraved with _Ferret, Koi, and Rose. _A lovely plate with her son's handprint was wrapped up as well with a matching mug with her daughter's handprint that were accompanied by a homemade cards with large crayon depictions. Huge picture frames of the little boy with his baby sister in various scenes from bath time to outdoors in the rose gardens were captured for the mother to hang. A lovely gold charm bracelet with a simple koi fish and rose attached were also wrapped up for the young mother.

**September 26, 2000**

"Koi, did Mummy like her present from Daddy?"

The boy furrows his brow as he stops coloring, glances to his father without a word and continues coloring.

"Koi," his father gently touches his son's shoulder and the boy flinches away. His heart drops at the boy's second rejection after refusing to sit on his father's lap.

"Draco," his mother gently intervenes before further damage can be inflicted. "She didn't take too well to the gift," she hesitates, "It's sitting in all its box on the counter still and she burnt your letter."

He clenches his fists and bits his tongue to stop inappropriate words for his young children to hear from rolling off his tongue.

_"Da," the little boy shrieks in the night and the mother stumbles into his room, scooping the protesting child who continues to wail for his father. His screams are distressed and frantic with tears pouring down his cheeks and his mother cradles him to her, murmuring that he is safe in her arms. "Da," the boy pleads, searching for his father despite his mother's presence._

_"He's not here, baby," the mother whispers brokenly and without thought that this little boy will use this for his justification to resent his absent father in his later years. "Daddy's not here. Daddy's not here," she chants to the boy._

He glances to his son's drawing and it's nothing resembling past family portraits or the Manor, just angry scratches and scars of crayons shoved onto paper with furious marks.

**November 1, 2000**

Pictures of his son and daughter were spread across his brick wall beside his bed, a collage of their faces to obscure the abyss of white that had once been constricting to him, and still adorning the wall was her—he hadn't the heart to take down her face and maybe because he still wasn't ready to make his final peace with that part of his life yet.

_He combs over the records and history of Christianity, he delves into a world of discrimination and hate of homosexuals, non-Europeans with darker complexions, and men following other deities. He sees the transgressions of those that believe in an all merciful, all loving, all forgiving, and all seeing God yet they believe that this God can forgive murderers and rapists and molesters but he can never forgive a man for loving another man, the hypocrisy. For all these Christians are nothing like their Christ. For they decimated populations of natives to conquer the land and for they enslaved a whole race of people with different hues of skin._

_Upon inspection of another religious book—the Quran—he finds a similar theme of an ever-forgiving Allah that echoes the Western world's deity. Yet, he finds fault in Islam because of those extremists that have tainted the name of Muslims with terrorism. And in those that have punished the women for having been raped._

_He realizes that all religions have started war, failed to feed the poor, manipulated to conquer people, condemned races to slavery, ostracized the new world and old world, justified the unjustifiable, executed millions, slaughtered and decimated, bred prejudice and intolerance, birthed superiority and inferiority, forced science away, silenced truth, proclaimed lies, distorted reality, and exacerbated mankind into depravity at times. He wonders how he can ever find forgiveness in the organized religions of this world._

_"It's funny isn't it," a soft voice asks, intruding his thoughts, "that all of mankind for its entirety has created deities that possess absolute forgiveness for all of man's transgressions and man still continues to betray the deity because the man believes all will be forgiven if he confesses. Man has justified his sins through creating a deity that absolves sin," a slight twitch to her lips._

_"I thought you believed in this God," he motions to the bible beside him._

_Her smile grows and her eyes twinkle, "I find that it if it is safer to be feared than loved, than it must be safer to believe in a God and find out he doesn't exist than to discover he did exist and have never believed in a God." And regardless of her hesitation to announce her faith and trust in this deity, her smile is so inviting and radiant that for a moment, he forgets everything he has done to Katie Bell and the liquor he sent to Professor Slughorn._

His hands skimmed over the cover of _The Great Gatsby_ again; it was the second time he had checked it out and he once again found himself drawn to the green light at the edge of Daisy's dock and this whole sense of forlorn hope and lost love.

_She doesn't ask the question of his guilt because there is a part of her that knows the answer, part that wants to refute his responsibility, part that wants to absolve him, part that wants to deny, part that wants to confront him, and a part of her that feels betrayed. Her eyes brim with tears that thickly roll down her cheeks._

_His shirt is balled into his fist, sanguine stains evident in its crumpled heap, but the scars that mar his chest are illuminated by the moonlight and he can't conceal the wounds when she's caught him crawling back to his den._

_"Did he do that," she shakily whispers, her feet gliding across the floor to shrink the distance between them as her hands delicately reach out to trace the rough ridges of the mended flesh, torn open mere hours before, her glistening gaze lingering on the obscene amount of scars that stretch across his chest._

_He roughly swallows, glancing down to the brunette and he sees the dark bruises beneath her eyes, the swollen bottom lip from gnawing it in her state of hysteria and worry, her fingertips barely caress his flesh, quivering as they roam over the gashes, and she's raised slightly on her toes with her face leaning into him to better inspect the healer's craft. His body is immobile, frozen by the unexpected welcome after what he's done._

_"Stop," he barks out, stepping away after tense seconds of silence as she awaits his confirmation and as she thoroughly observes the damage inflicted._

_"He maimed you," she aggressively bites back, her eyes darting up to him, "Look what he's done," she spits disgustedly, "Regardless if you were the victim or perpetrator."_

_"Don't you know what I've done," he derisively spews back at her, a mask of arrogance obscures him as he reminds her of what she already knows but has decided to ignore. "What I was trying to do."_

_She falters, her knees almost buckling, falling backwards like she had been slapped because his motives had been forgotten, or maybe she had truly denied them and ignored them, as she had tried to do with the consequences of his futile attempt. Her eyes dart down to the serpent upon his forearm and her heart halts as her mind taunts her of how she could have forgotten that he was one of them._

_"Forget what side I was on," he taunts, "Mudblood," a twisted sneer on his face._

_"Then why am I still breathing, Death Eater," she taunts. "Or did you forget that you're supposed to terminate all the Mudbloods, slaughter us and annihilate us, execute us and murder to the point of genocide."_

_A grotesque image of her mangled corpse, scars marring her, mouth agape in captured anguish, severed limbs and the smell of burning flesh, screaming in the abyss, echoing and stretching past the horizon, stacks of smoke billowing into the night creating a plume, bodies strewn at his feet, pyramids of skulls and carcasses, grieving children at the sides of skeletons, sea of sanguine; genocide, slaughter, massacre, execution, murder, annihilation, decimation, gone._

_His eyes flutter shut with contrition and disgust and repulsion and revulsion and horror and abhorrence. A lonely tear trickles down his cheek, sliding down the ebony lash that caress the soft flesh of his face tucked beneath his broken gaze. _

But he can't let her go.


	11. Chapter 10

**Chapter 10:**

**November 21, 2000**

Her mother gently squeezes her hand because in all honesty there is nothing she can offer to ease her daughter's pain when she has never been a part of her world and she has never been a mother to a child with an incarcerated father and she has never loved a man that has committed such crimes.

There's a part of this mother that wishes she had not instilled her daughter's forgiveness and love because she would have saved her daughter from this fate because her little girl loved far too much. She should have warned her daughter of the fate of Icarus when he flew too high to the giving sun and when he flew too low to the seizing ocean—taught her daughter to love enough to fly in between and to not dive down to the depths of those to save and to not fly towards causes that were blinding. And maybe her daughter would not love this boy as she does.

"It's so poisonous," the daughter murmurs, "and I can feel it blackening my heart."

"Remember his phase," the mother softly speaks, "this is all a stage for you. Anger is a natural aspect of incarceration for the women abandoned by their partners. The dynamic of your relationship is evolved to be at the hands of the prison and you've never been left so alone with limited time allotted together. And it's not about you and him in these visits because he is a father to your children and they need time together to bond. When he's not home, it's you and the children he has left you with and you're juggling the stress of being a single mother at a young age. And for you, Hermione, you envisioned so much more for yourself—university and a career and then marriage and children, but everything you had planned was flipped on its head. You're angry and sweetie, your anger isn't necessarily at him because you're angry that he's not here for you and your children, but you're angry at the system that's incarcerated him because they took him."

**December 10, 2000**

Legs spread, hands against the wall and above his head—fully extended up—gloved hands roughly scour his body for concealed weapons. His steel gaze remains fixed upon the cement block, his jaw locked with bitterness and arrogance and he's trying to maintain the scraps of his identity through their wandering hands up his thighs and around his calves and from the neck up he mirrors a soldier, unyielding and stoic.

Sneers of revulsion color the faces of the guards as they search him. One slyly retracts an archaic clump of melted plastic with a perverse blade from his sleeve, slipping the fabricated weapon to his gloved hand that pulls away from the sleeve of the inmate—left arm exposing the Dark Mark—and flourishes the shank as if it's a discovery.

"Weapon concealing," the very guard scolds the inmate with a tilt of his lips in triumphant.

The inmate cocks his head to glance disgustedly at the offending derision of a blade and up to the guard that twirls the blade between his fingers; the inmate angrily spits in the face of the guard. Instantly, the inmate is slammed into the cement wall and handcuffed with the shackles.

_Hermione,_

_I've never had the intent to assault another inmate, never the intent to seriously maim another inmate, do you understand? I've never had the need to conceal a weapon on my body for any intent. _

_These guards are just as corrupt and dirty as the police. They don't face these same consequences or exposure as the police because every single victim is convicted criminal, not a suspect._

_Whatever they charge me with, accuse me of, convict me of, I was innocent of. I was framed when they found the weapon concealed on my body in a pat down. I never made the weapon and I never bought the weapon. I never had it smuggled in and I never concealed it on my body. I never had the intent to use a weapon and I never had the intent to defend myself with a weapon. _

_Draco_

**December 25, 2000**

The little boy tightly held onto a red figurine—the face masked with a large ebony shape over the features, white gloves and boots, and a skin-tight crimson suit—as he pretends the Power Ranger was battling the evil Dark Lord that his Uncle Harry had weaved grotesque warped stories of to the boy. In the boy's mind, the Power Ranger is fighting to rescue his father from the Dark Lord that has trapped his daddy in the triangular fortress because that's what he overheard mummy saying one night to his uncle Harry. And the Power Rangers have always been able to vanquish evil, against any monster and bad-guy.

"What's going on," the dark skinned man kneels down to the boy that eerily resembles the boy he knew in his childhood but something is amiss in the boy's face. Blaise Zabini settles beside the boy with a soft smile because he acknowledges this is only the one of many Christmases and birthdays and Easters and so many more that Draco Malfoy will miss in his son's life that this boy is oblivious and ignorant of for the moment.

The boy will innocently relay the whole scenario of the Red Power Ranger fighting against the Dark Lord to save his daddy and his father's childhood friend will shed a tear at the child's naivety and the sheer love this boy has for his father regardless of the times the boy has refused to play with his father at visits because the boy merely wants his father at home when he wakes up crying—for he is just a boy with easily fading anger and consuming love, and only later will this anger ever be poisonous. And something in the man will crack at the boy's words because it's completely heartbreaking that this boy wants to save his father and it's completely tragic that the boy is far too late to save his father from the Dark Lord and it's completely beautiful at the same time.

The mother, leaning against the doorframe as she watched her son, with a glass of amber liquid in hand, shattered the glass as her son explained. The glass shredded her palm and fingers and sanguine freely flowed, a current that boiled in her blood as the anger of the injustice of father and son separated brewed and spilled onto the shards of glass.

**January 3, 2001**

The Latina exhales, tilting her chin up as her eyes fall shut.

The brunette stubs out her cigarette.

"They don't give a fuck about us," the Latina spits angrily, a fire whirling in her eyes. "We're a fucking member of the hopeless lost causes that these fucking politicians and this whole crooked system doesn't give a fuck what our fates are because they fucking locked up the problem, didn't they? They cleared the streets up for the moment. 'Cause they ain't solving the fucking disease of the ghetto. They keep adding to the fucking problem by locking up fathers and separating sons to be raised by a woman that's struggling to pay the fucking bills and barely has time to show this boy how to be a man so this boy turns to the streets and the other older boys that are just as fucking lost. They don't give a fuck about us because they're nestled up in the fucking mansions looking down their noses at us, a widening gap between us that protects them from our filth."

The Latina's son sprints past with a gang of other little boys.

"Like fucking Pac said, they're the ones putting guns in our hands and letting us kill each other over trivial shit. They don't have to clean up the mess they've made in actuality, they just grab anyone of us off the street, handcuff and slap him with some charges and lock him up so they can tell the rest of the people that crime is at a all time low because they're doing their job. They could give a fuck if a little kid on welfare gets shot on the corner instead of some gangbanger because regardless it's one less of us. They don't give a fuck if a son never knows his incarcerated father because the boy is bound to be his cellmate anyway or another outline in chalk." (*)

"They falsified some weapon concealing charge," the brunette vents and the Latina cruelly smiles.

"And you thought the cops were dirty, fucking after Rodney King the other side saw that they're cops weren't better than us, but the guards are just as dirty. How else do these gangs survive in prison?"

***The Latina's views are based upon Tupac's songs "Changes" and "They Don't Give a Fuck About Us." I've taken some of what Pac said in the songs and paraphrased his message. **


	12. Chapter 11

**Chapter 11: **

** January 16, 2001**

With soft-spoken words, she gingerly explained her anger and her anguish with his incarceration and the fallout of the web of entanglements from his conviction. In somber silence, he listened with a mask that did not betray the guilt that clawed at him, and maybe it was partly because he knew not what to say or maybe he didn't want to whisper promises he could never keep to her.

"Draco," her voice is hoarse and strained, "I…I'm going through changes and I don't….I don't know where the line of me loving you because you are the father of my children lies and where the line of me loving you is drawn in my heart."

For everything he has sacrificed for her—through the war and in prison—he…but he heavily exhales and his knuckles relax from the fist because it was for her. And maybe there's a subconscious level of exhaustion and weariness from prison that he lets it go.

"Maybe there isn't a line," he counters. The words spill from his own perception of her.

She pauses.

Her lips stretch wide, but no teeth are shown in her smile, but it's genuine and he can see it.

**February 14, 2001 **

The father's hand presses against the barrier with ripples of orgasmic hues, his hand dwarfing his young son that has leaned forward over the table to have their palms touch and his other hand kissing his young daughter's tiny palm. His daughter leans forward, lips smushed together for a sloppy kiss and the father happily obliges as he brushes his lips against the barrier as his daughter reciprocates on the other side and they pull back with brilliant smiles.

"Does Daddy get a kiss, Koi," she gently asks the little boy upon her lap. The boy quickly kisses his father through the barrier—the mother does not see the father motion for the boy to kiss his mother for his father—and then the boy cranes back to his mother and demands a kiss that she obliges in.

Regardless, the brunette leans forward, "Doesn't Mummy get a kiss, Daddy?"

His lips twitch and he arrogantly winks roguishly.

**February 16, 2001 **

Two sets of footprints in red paint were pressed against the large piece of ebony parchment with large swirls of vibrant colors—intended as galaxies—were scattered in around the footprints.

_From the edges of the universe to the tips of my toes…_

_My love for you Daddy just grows and grows!_

_Hugs and kisses for our Daddy that we love,_

_Koi and Rose_

A separate letter had also been included in the package.

_Draco,_

_You used to see the world through a monocle that distorted your narrowed vision that already could not see the horizon or any of the ships floating past in the calm waves of the ocean, but now you see the world through the underside of a glass bottom boat and you can see the horizon looming in the distance, the heavens above and the ships nearby and if you avert your gaze you will see the creatures beneath and the darkness of the abyss. You see things, Draco, things that many have overlooked or forgotten. _

_ And you have a mind to interpret the images you have perceived. You are intelligent and capable beyond what you fathom. You are not ignorant. You are a voracious reader and you challenge me and stimulate my own abilities of intellect. You reciprocate the conversation. You are thought provoking._

_You can articulate your vision and your essence, though you may only do so in the cloak of night to an unborn child, but you do. In those moments you are incredibly vulnerable and candid and if I reach out, I could grasp all your worries and anxieties of fatherhood and your sins._

_You are ambitious to raise our children so they do not pay for your sins and they do not follow your footsteps. You are solely determined to raise them with this vision and this intelligence to never be blind or misled. And you have been so driven to atone for your sins, but you don't see that you have atoned with every step you take for the children's sake. And you are so ambitious in the endeavor that your fatherhood will not be reminiscent of your own father._

_The love you posses for the children is unrivaled by anything I can ever comprehend beside my own love for them, but there is something infinitely different with your love. Witnessing you as father to our children adds to the increasing list of reasons of why I love you. You are gentle and loving and strong and fierce for them and it's the perfect balance for a father. I know you would tear your heart from your chest for them if they needed it, be strung up to have your liver pecked day and day again like Prometheus, hold the burden of the world like Atlas, serve all eternity in the depths of Tartarus, have your palms hammered to the cross and wear the crown of thorns, and you would do anything for them._

_You are not a coward because you could not utter the unforgivable in the astronomy tower. Only a brave man could be surrounded by encroaching fear and not submit to conceding and bowing to it by executing the mission. Regardless of the words nearly slipping from your lips, you never did and you are not a coward because you could not be an assassin. And for your failure, I love you more despite the mark upon your arm. Only a brave man would lie to those he claims allegiance to for him to protect his childhood enemies. Only a brave man could change his perception of the world and turn his back on everything he was raised on—the very foundation of his childhood. _

_ You have given me two beautiful and healthy children that I cannot fathom what life would be without them—classes day and night and study sessions—and I could never want another life, though having you there beside me through it all would be something to imagine, but we can't change that for now and you will be released before Koi goes to Hogwarts._

_And you have loved me when I least deserve it—when I have turned my back on you and when I left you all alone. You have loved me for all my faults and imperfections. You love me for god knows why but somehow you've seen some part of me that others failed to see. You love me because I am beautiful and it's the kind of beauty that runs beneath the flesh._

_In this life or the next, a thousand years or a thousand seconds, for all eternity I will love you because you have given me an affinity for myself and motherhood and you have come with that unconditional love. _

_I would end with the three iconic words but they sound so simple to ever capture my perception of you._

_Hermione_

**March 4, 2001**

Scattered upon the concrete, a layer of ash from the waning flames, but they are his letters and pictures strewn upon the floor of his cell from the aftermath of the scouring search of the guards in his cell for contraband with total disregard for his personal effects.

With a twisted sneer, a guard plucks a picture of a brunette with her bare back exposed, the ivory sheets dipping low on her waist, her chest pressed against his back with his cheek against the pillow and a delicate smile on his face as he sighs contently, her feet gliding up his calves beneath the sheets as she caresses his shoulders with her lips.

"Ah, the mudblood whore," the guard sneers with delight, tracing his finger down the brunette's spine. "You know what they say about Malfoy's having the best, her cunt…" he lewdly trails off as he glances to the stoically silent inmate.

"Bit loose," another guard counters disgustedly, "from those two bastards she birthed."

The shackles around his ankles strained as he lunged.

The guard nearest to him swung up with his baton to collide with the inmate's jaw.

"Look at the blood traitor," the first hisses with revulsion.

"And he dares carry the Dark Mark," the second spits, "should have burned the mark off his flesh for his betrayal or peeled it off with a knife."

"You're lucky that it's not easy to forge excuses for convicted Death Eaters still loyal to the cause to be in protective custody for an ex-Death Eater that fucked a mudblood and has spawns with the bitch for them to slit the traitor's throat for him to choke on his blood," the first snarls.

"Easy enough to draw up falsified charges of weapon concealing, though?" His chin is tilted up in arrogance as he spits back to the guards.

Perhaps if he weren't so arrogant, he would have never responded to incur the wrath of the guards that easily conjured bottle of homemade liquor of fermenting brew from his meals.

"Weapon concealing, binge drinking, might upset the whore," the first taunted, "Don't think she'd appreciate the rolling stone for the sake of the children or her image, but could she stoop any lower after fucking a washed up ex-Death Eater that didn't have the stomach to finish the mission."


	13. Chapter 12

**Chapter 12: **

**June 30, 2004 **

The last few years were a constant rollercoaster for the young couple with two small children—the father was struggling with his anger with the justice system behind bars and his separation from his children and he came into frequent conflict with the guards, often with suspended visitation that grew lengthier. But the mother remained ever supportive and loving despite her own struggle with the strain of single motherhood.

Since her childhood, Hermione Granger had always been able to note the pointed features of Draco Malfoy, but today, his cheeks were round and concealed his cheekbones and beneath his chin the flesh sunk down a bit more. His prison garb didn't drown him—his upper arm filled out the uniform and his legs were wider and his belly was not smooth as it had been in his Quidditch days.

Had she looked at the account for the canteen, she would have seen the spike in spending and its correlation to the ever increasing isolation of father and children at the hands of the guards and maybe she would have made the connection with depression re-appearing and instead of refusing to eat, he was binging to cope.

Their son is silent, sitting in the chair beside his mother with his hands in his lap. But their daughter smiles radiantly as she happily tells her father of all the adventures they partook in with their grandmother and mother in Italy with Uncle Blaise as their guide.

The father nods along with a forced smile as he glances to his son.

The boy's hair has thankfully not been slicked back with gel as his father's had been at his age, but it's just as blond and unruly, perhaps it's a trait that every little boy possesses at this age. The boy has his mother's nose and her lips and cheekbones but his eyes are the color of coal like his father and his chin is his father's.

The brunette mother gently rubs soothing circles into her son's back to coax him to participate in this visit because she knows not if there will be a next one and the time span between with the instability.

"Daddy," the little girl squeaks out and the father turns his attention to his daughter.

Her ringlets bounce around her face—the spitting image of her mother in every way imaginable. Her hazel eyes twinkle as she continues her tirade of stories. In the split second she demands her father's attention, it unravels that she's striving for her father's love and attention and how different she is from her mother.

Her words barely trickle through to him, but he hears how very ostracized their lives are even though she's his daughter and he is her father. And he looks at her and her brother, really looks at them, how old they are and how many years he's sacrificed separate from them in their childhood and how these years will never be given back and they are the very ones he would give a lung for because any year after these will be lost to Hogwarts and them stepping out into the adult world. And he curses a little boy that idolized his father long ago and he curses a young boy that took a Dark Mark long ago. He yearns to twist back the hands of time.

**July 10, 2004**

"Your father was a seeker back in school," the man with windswept ebony hair and rounded glasses softly tells the boy as the boy peels his dragon hide gloves off his hands, broomstick resting at their feet.

The elder smiles, reminiscing of his childhood, back to the day he flew for the first time, and he's oblivious to the solemnness of the child at the mention of his absent father.

"Uncle Harry," the boy meekly mutters, fiddling with his gloves, and the elder squeezes the boy's shoulder in assurance to ask things he's never been able to ask his mother or grandmother because of the glistening look in their eyes at the mention of his father. "Was he always there?" And the boy is not trying to be vague because he truly has no conception of the truth that his father is incarcerated—his father's situation has always been unspoken of and known that Daddy cannot come home.

The elder pauses, a sad smile stretching across his face, and there is so much to explain to this child of his father and of the war and they are all entangled together.

"Before you were born, your mother was whisked away by your father to a small beach house on the coast of France and the reasons for your parents leaving England behind is another story, and your father traveled back and forth to the cottage and to the Manor, painting the ceiling of your nursery and your walls in both," he gently begins, "Your mother has told me that he has left you letters that he had written in the night to you before you were born and he stayed up one night to create the music box that has played in your room since you were an infant."

Tears spill down the boy's cheek because he had never been told that a part of his father existed in the walls of his room, the very walls he has delicately traced the features of the heroes and has he had laid in bed, drawn the swirls of the galaxies though the air.

"And you were far too young to understand or remember, but one night your father couldn't come home and I can't explain it to you. But your father never had a choice in leaving you."

**July 31, 2004**

_Koi and Rose,_

_You know how Mummy always says there is a place called Heaven and a place called Hell, Hell has a similar place on this Earth for this life and it is called prison. And you remember the stories Mummy has told you about the ancient Greek myths and all the different punishments for those that defied the gods in the Underworld—the man that had to push the rock uphill only for it to roll back or the man that could never eat and drink despite his hunger and thirst. _

_ Daddy went to prison just a few months after you were born, Koi, and a little bit before Mummy knew about you, Rose. Daddy's punishment was being taken from you and locked away in the triangular building you always come to visit Daddy in and Daddy will be locked away until Koi is about to head off to Hogwarts._

_Daddy going to prison had nothing to do with you two, but it had been because of bad things Daddy had done before Koi was born when Mummy was carrying him in her belly and just before then._

_Long ago there was a little boy with slicked back hair that sneered down his nose at a little girl with a nest of curls atop her head because her ancestors were not wizards and witches and her blood was filthy and dirty because of it. She was beneath him and he hated that she was polluting the world he was raised in. This little boy hated and condemned this little girl very similar to when the whites degraded the blacks for the color of their skin._

_His father spat upon the likes of the little girl and the boy followed his father's every step including horrendous unjustified hatred. When the boy was little, he dressed up as his father and played pretend in the gardens of his home with his friend and they committed unspeakable acts against imaginary victims to be like their parents. The boy marveled over the father's scar on his left forearm, entranced by the serpent from the skull, and soon enough the boy would wear a matching one._

_But you see, this scar symbolized everything the boy had been raised to believe about the little girl but also of things that were unforgivable and sent his aunt to prison long before. At the time, the boy was sixteen and he knew nothing of consequences for himself and he didn't think to imagine that he would follow his father's footsteps because his father had been sent away to prison just before. The boy was far more concerned with survival and pride because he still believed in these things. When you're young, you think you're invincible and that nothing can touch you and in some twisted way the boy believed he would escape a conviction if this all went downhill because he never committed atrocities as his aunt had._

_Daddy was given a task that Daddy failed to finish but Daddy's attempt to do so earned Daddy his punishment. I wish I knew a gentler way to tell you of what I nearly did, but I do not know how I could with you being able to understand the gravity of what Daddy nearly did and why Daddy needed to be given his punishment._

_Standing in the Astronomy Tower, Daddy held a man who had known Daddy since he was a little boy at his mercy, wand pointed to him with the intent to kill. I hesitated because I could not kill a man and I certainly could not kill a man that had accepted your mother and I together and was so willing to have us taken to the edge of the Atlas to hide away. He didn't see me as a monster as other students had and he didn't see me as some pathetic son trying to take the burden of his father's faults, but he saw me as a boy who had made all the wrong choices and he understood the point I had reached—I was drowning in the allegiances I had swore and the girl that I was helplessly in love with. But I was far too afraid of the consequences if I chose one over the other—my mother's life was at stake and your mother's life and possibly you._

_And standing there with him defenseless, I finally was dangling over the cliff, waiting to either fall into the Death Eater's ranks or to be pulled back up by Dumbledore's grace. All along, I had been slipping and your mother was trying to hold onto me. I juggled the two lives the majority of the school year leading up to that fateful night. But I kept ignoring the inevitable point of the two colliding because to admit that was admitting that I had to make a choice, one I was not willing to make. I knew that killing him would be unforgivable with your mother and despite her blind eye to everything else I had done and all her attempts to reconcile me, she could not look past the murder of the man she trusted and respected and I knew that if I didn't kill him, my mother would be executed before me—I couldn't lose either. _

_ I never knew the price for standing there with him at my mercy and having ignored the inevitable fate that the consequences would be far more than I could have comprehended. I had no idea that my own children would pay for my sins with my absence from their childhoods. There are no words to express how sorry I am that you have to pay for my sins because my incarceration was only ever meant to punish a boy that made all the wrong choices, not the little boy and girl that this very misled boy fathered. _


	14. Chapter 13

**Chapter 13:**

**July 31, 2004**

With her palm against the barrier, the ripples of soft hues stretch out, and if the barrier wasn't in place, she possibly could have reached out to caress his cheek, but she knows that there is far more than distance between them and far more than a magical spell separating them.

"You aren't alone," she murmurs tenderly—it's her cry for him to laden her with his burdens.

He bitterly smiles but never refutes her because the moment she leaves, he will be, and before she came he was alone with his cell.

"Draco, please."

_"Please," she softly speaks, her fingers reaching out for him as her other hand gently pulls the sheer shawl tight around her waist._

_He halts in his steps to retreat from the Room of Requirements but doesn't turn back to glance at her—curls in disarray, the shawl clinging to her slender frame and far too high on her thigh, and her face is slightly flushed—and it's partly guilt that he allowed this mere hours before he has planned to betray her by importing the Death Eaters and having Dumbledore at his mercy and there is a part that wants her to beg him to stay and forget his responsibilities hours from now and have her touch cleanse him from everything he has stained with his hands._

_"For the night," and she's offering a night of them wrapped in each other's arms and a night to escape from his nightmares and it's very tempting. "I don't want to be alone."_

"I have been incarcerated for 1,994 days," he exhales shakily and her brows rise at the number, "that's five years of my children's lives that I have been absent from and do you know how much I missed out on from their lives. I've missed their first steps and words and I've missed far more than that from their first laugh and smile. I've missed the nights they awake in fear and I've missed the mornings awakened by their joyful laughing and smiles. I've missed bathing them and tucking them in. I've missed the mischief they have managed and I've missed teaching them the simplest lessons. I missed my daughter's birth. And you know how much more I will miss, don't you?"

"Draco," and it's her pain for him.

"And when I am released, he'll be off to Hogwarts and I won't have those moments either and she'll be on her way right behind her brother and I'll miss the moments I barely had with her. Don't you see, my children will never have a childhood with me and I will never have my children?"

**September 28, 2004**

He pushes his tongue against the jiggling tooth to show his mother and grandmother how loose it is.

His mother is partly horrified by the boy as the tooth leans forwards and backwards barely tethered by the root with him grinning like an idiot. She certainly never found as much delight in wiggling her loose teeth regardless of how excited she was at the prospect of a loose tooth. But there's an overwhelming nostalgia and tears threatening to spill because her baby boy is growing up and she remembers her first loose tooth.

The grandmother gently smiles, lost in her memories of another little boy that had so excitedly tried to lose his tooth by tying some floss around it and the other end around a door knob before his best friend slammed the door shut and ripped the tooth out in a bloody mess.

"Your father yanked his out the first moment he got with Uncle Blaise," the grandmother says.

Intrigue glistens in the boy's eyes. "What'd he do?"

The grandmother laughs because it's déjà vu of a conversation she had with her son long ago when she told him of how his father lost his first tooth with the encouragement of her sister Bellatrix.

Several hours later, a house elf grabs the young miss that is mother to the little boy that has just busted his upper lip and knocked out his first tooth in a bloody mess in the rose gardens after spending the afternoon running about with his little sister, both chased around by their Uncle Blaise. Frantically, the mother hurries off to attend to her son.

In the chaos, no one hears the little boy accidently label his father's childhood friend as dad because this man has been there far more often than his own father has been.

**October 21, 2004 **

The little girl kneels beside her bed, her palms pressed together in prayer. "I want a Daddy like Nemo's daddy," she pleads because she wants a daddy that would go the edge of the Atlas to search for her and to save her because Mummy had said that Nemo's daddy loved his child far too much to let him go and her daddy has never gone to these lengths and sometimes she wonders if daddy would ever go to these lengths to find her, and when he doesn't, if he loves her as he says he does. She doesn't understand that him never leaving the room with the barrier separating them from each other won't allow him to scour the planet for her to show her he loves her.

_"Daddy, do you love me?" _

_ He had paused because he was heartbroken that she didn't already know the answer but she had interpreted the pause as his hesitation to admit that he loved her as much as Nemo's daddy loved Nemo. _

On some subconscious level, she doesn't want to be the one looking for her Daddy and that's all she's been doing her life—trying to get to her Daddy for the love and attention she seeks from him. She wants her Daddy to be chasing after her.

The grandmother standing outside the girl's bedroom with the door ajar breaks down upon hearing the girl's request and she doesn't have the strength to open the door to confront this. Incessant tears run rampant down her cheeks. The shards of her glass heart can only shatter so much and it has seen too much pain again and again with her husband and son.

**November 1, 2004**

Had he been a father in the home where his children lived, the fridge would have been adorned with hand drawn pictures and notes from his children and their faces and magnets of colorful letters spelling out messages of love, but he wasn't and his pictures and notes were obscuring the bricks of his prison cell. The whole façade of a father with children, children that have drawn a happy family in these pictures strewn around his cell, crumbles the moment he acknowledges that he's no father and these pictures lie and depict his presence in his children's lives and he's truly just an inmate in the penitentiary.

Everything that a young father had feared when he stepped into the prison, stripped down and searched, and escorted to his cell with his mattress has come to fruition. He has lost any concept of reality outside here and he has lost his children. He is haunted by the memories of a young father with a young son but he has forgotten the smoothness of a baby's flesh and the warmth of a child and the feel of her kisses. Their lives have progressed without him and they have lived without him and he has barely survived and cleaves to the idea of them for him to extend his life. He can't let them go but they have let him go in everything apart from the scattered visits here and there for his sake.

But he realizes that he's not afraid of losing them anymore than he has because he's been adjusting to this for years now. It seems that he's always losing—Potter to Quidditch and far more, Hermione to grades, the war, his father long ago, his children, and freedom.

He's far more worried and afraid of leaving prison and entering the world again because he has no idea how to be a father to children that have moved past the stage of complete dependence on him to change their diapers and feed and rock to sleep. He's far more afraid of entering her life again as a constant because she has grown and aged and she is no longer a girl thrust into war because she was the best friend of the Boy Who Lived and her blood status.


	15. Chapter 14

**Chapter 14:**

**November 2, 2004**

_She swings, her feet touching the setting sun, her curls flaying around as he gently pushes her. _

_"Daddy, not too high," she shrieks. _

_"I've got you, Rose," he soothes her._

_She swings higher and she's clutching tightly to the chain of her swing when the swing's chain is nearly parallel with the ground, but when he catches sight of the ground, it's not there—just them floating with this swing._

_"Daddy, please," his daughter desperately pleads frantically. "Not too high!"_

_"I've got you, baby," he reminds her as his hands push her back to the sun._

_"No, daddy, no!" _

_The chains disintegrate and wings appear as they carry his screaming daughter._

_"Daddy, please! Daddy!"_

_"Rose!"_

_But the wings keep fluttering as they carry his daughter away to the sun._

_"Draco, remember the tell of Icarus?" His mother's voice is but a whisper._

_"Daddy! Daddy!" _

_"Icarus flew too high and the sun melted the glue holding his feathers together and then he flew too low and was lost forever, remember Draco." _

_"Please, Daddy! Daddy!"_

_"Prison has melted your wings, Draco." _

The inmate jolts awake.

"Higher Nana," the little girl demands happily, her grandmother running beneath the child to give her an underdog. "Higher!"

**December 7, 2004 **

"Kisses for Daddy?" The grandmother arches her brow at the little girl and boy, urging them to go up to the barrier and kiss their father.

"Love you, Daddy," the little girl murmurs after her kiss and his smile nearly tears his jaw off his face from the sheer size.

His son shyly smiles and quickly kisses him, but it's enough from his son who has often been silent in these visits at the beginning.

"How much you love me?" The little girl quickly demands.

The inmate glances to his mother that stifles a laugh at her granddaughter.

He spreads his arms wide and laughs as his daughter nods as if he needed her approval at his wingspan to demonstrate how much he loves his daughter, but it's her newest obsession of asking him how much he loves her and him spreading his arms wide. "Bigger than the universe," he swears with his arms still extended.

"Like Nemo's Daddy?"

He nods though he only knows of Nemo from what Hermione has told him of his daughter's favorite movie.

"I'd save you just like the Power Rangers," he adds, another note he's taken from Hermione who has told him of his son's obsession, and his son brightens at the mention.

Back in his cell, the loneliness is stifling and suffocating as always.

No matter how much he is not afraid of losing his children, there is an inexplicable fear of letting them go without them knowing how much he loves them. Because with everything else he has ever failed to give them or to be there for them, the only thing left to give his love.

**December 8, 2004**

"Daddy," the little girl shouted, running into her father's waiting arms, and he quickly scooped her and spun her around to her endless delight of giggles. With the infectious happiness, the little boy ran to his father, quickly shifted his daughter to scoop up his son in his other arm. Still in his arms, the father gave kisses to his daughter and son with a large smile gracing his face as he held them close.

"No kiss for Daddy, Mummy," he smirks as he teases the mother of his children.

"Daddy's silly, isn't he?" She winks at her daughter who stifles another fit of giggles, and despite the teasing her belly is fluttering at the notion of kissing him again after so long.

"You're the one kissing ferrets," he counters.

"Ferrets," his daughter wrinkles her nose at the image of her mother kissing ferrets.

"Amazing bouncing ferrets," she corrects both child and man, stretching up on her toes to softly kiss his lips and she pulls away before anything can happen because there are still children in the room and they are already far too curious.

"Better than a foul, evil, loathsome cockroach," he jokes, laughing at his daughter's disgusted face still lingering from the ferrets comment.

"I think Daddy's," she whispers conspiratorially to the children as her fingers create a swirl by her ear, motioning crazy. "Mummy would never kiss a cockroach." But she's smiling at him because she remembers third year vividly for that particular memory.

He quickly leans forward to kiss her and pulls back before she can respond, "Just did," he chants victoriously as he retracts.

"I guess Daddy's gone crazy," Rose shouts, throwing her hands up because she's lost her parents with ferrets and cockroaches and kissing. "Completely mental," Koi adds as an afterthought and Hermione completely crumbles into a fit of giggles because it was so eerily similar to Ron and the boy raises his brows in confusion and both children silently agree that their parents have lost it.

As the laughing recedes and he lowers his children back down to their feet, they happily drag him to the coloring table and all the silliness has disappeared and a sudden hovering specter is lingering between the children's unasked questions and the incarcerated father. But the distraction of crayons and doddles seem to avoid the unspoken.

Silence settles as Hermione pulls a chair up beside him, their thighs against another and her fingers slip between his as she leans her head against his shoulder.

"Dad," their son meekly speaks, his crayon stilled and his eyes still downcast. "When do you come home?"

She squeezes his hand.

"I'll be home soon," he lies because he doesn't have the heart to tell his son that he won't be home any time soon and the boy will be nearly off to Hogwarts when he does return home.

"You always say that," the boy snaps.

"Koi, there are things you are far too young to understand," his mother gently tells him.

"I'm six!" And it's as if six is some big number that grants him the right to understand these things, but he's far too young to grasp that ignorance is bliss.

"Koi, I won't be home tomorrow or the day after that, but I swear to you that I will come home," he vows.

His daughter has been watching silently, crayon discarded and her bottom lip is quivering and her eyes glistening with unshed tears.

"Liar," the boy indignantly spits.

"Daddy won't be home until a few more birthdays," the mother gently murmurs, pulling her crying daughter into her lap for comfort, tracing abstract designs into her back.

The child's face is stoic and impassive as he processes the length of his father's continued absence.

"Daddy you're mine," the daughter screams, distraughtly struggling to reach for her father before her mother hands over her to the inmate. Her arms drape around his neck, securing herself to him in anyway she knows how, her face buried into his neck and he's encompassed her with his arms in a steel grip to hold her to him. "Always," he promises in a soft mumble.

"I wish Uncle Blaise was my father," the boy hisses.

The father's heart shatters at the confession but he ignores the boy because if he has lost his son, he needs to cling to his daughter for as long as he can. But his chest constricts at the thought that his own son denounces him as a father and he's never abused the boy, never misled the boy, never laid a hand on his son, and he denounces him regardless because he was not a father—he's everything his father never could be later in life, but somehow he isn't but is. He doesn't know which is more painful: the future of his relationship with his son being built torn to ashes or his failure as a father.

"Koi," his mother chokes out, attempting sternness and scolding for such a scathing comment brimming with hatred and resentment, but she can't because at times she has wished that the father of her children was not Draco Malfoy and she understands the anger. And she can't imagine the tears her son has shed in the night for his absent father and the questions swirling in his head about it all.


	16. Chapter 15

**Chapter 15:**

**December 8, 2004**

Shakily she attempts again to scold the boy, "Koi, you may be angry at your father, but don't ever say those hurtful things again." Her voice softens, "There are far too many things you do not understand but you will one day and you see everything your father has weathered through and everything now will make sense to you. I know you so desperately want to understand, but you have to wait just a bit for everything to be told to you. But for now, Koi, know that if Daddy had the choice, he'd be home with us."

"Koi, if I could, I would run to the edges of the Atlas with your mother and your sister and you and stay there for all eternity," the father whispers, "I'd never choose anything before you and this now," the father motions to the prison though the son has never labeled it as such, "is not my choice, but all my choices before you have led me here and I never knew it would be this long and you'd be here waiting for me. Koi, this is my punishment."

Quickly intervening before further probing, "Koi, let's finish up the picture for Daddy."

Maybe he shouldn't finish the picture because it depicts Blaise Zabini watching as the little boy soars on his broomstick—it's everything the father longs to be there for to teach his son but can't.

**December 14, 2004 **

The little boy's legs dangle off the shoulders of the ebony skinned man whose arms are spread wide and fingers are intertwined with the boy's as the boy sits upon his shoulders and had the boy not been ivory skinned, the two could have been father and son.

The stand-in father imagines a dark little boy upon his shoulders—his own flesh and blood—and perhaps his desire for a child is at the hands of having been a survivor of a war and maybe it's having seen his childhood friend lose everything he held dear in a bang of a gavel. Maybe's it a way for him to escape everything he has been witness to that in his earlier days, he had turned to other escapes that no longer held their appeal because of their risk of incarceration and a child is somehow promising of unconditional love. Maybe he seeks to see something of him that wasn't always so tainted.

The little boy who so desperately wants a father as a constant fixture in his life imagines that the father he has seen scattered throughout his life is the very one carrying him upon his shoulders but there is far less complications with this verison of his father—no instability and not a promise breaker and not a liar. Perhaps he has romanticized his father, but he's young and every little boy has made his father out upon this pedestal of a cape wearing crusader for justice with incredible strength and invincible.

"Da-Uncle Blaise," the boy catches the slip of his tongue.

The man bothers to neither correct or sternly reprimand the boy because once upon a time ago, he had been the boy's shoes—so desperate to have a father and he was calling any man that in any essence embodied the role father, and he remembers when he had accidently slipped the title of father to Lucius Malfoy when he was just a boy. He knows that it would break his best friend's heart to know that his son had slipped and called him father because he was more present than the boy's father. But he remembers the scouring and the searching and the void in his heart for a father that wasn't there and he understands this little boy perched on his shoulders because he had been this little boy. He remembers the loneliness, the questions, the feeling of being a lost sheep, how a mother's love wasn't enough, tears shed, and how a part of him was missing.

"How can Luke love his Daddy?"

The pureblood furrows his brow because he has no idea who this Luke character is for he has never seen Star Wars. Maybe he should have been far more concerned with the child asking how another son could ever love his father, than the name of some fictional character and his identity.

**January 2, 2005**

The boy lays wide awake in his bed, his mother beside his bed as she delicately unfolds a parchment with tender care.

"Your father wrote this just before you were born," she softly explains.

_To my son,_

_Before your birth, your mother and I have had to find a name befitting for you to carry, decorated your nursery so it will cradle you to sleep and will mold your initial perception of the world, read all the books I can grasp within my reach and maybe that's more your mother's frantic panic and worry that I have read so many, and I've been practicing to strap the car seat into the back because your mother is determined to have you at a muggle hospital. Apart from this, I have never felt less prepared for anything because fatherhood is far more than these brief moments in your life. _

_Because I can read all the books in the universe for what to expect throughout your childhood, but these books never can teach me how to show you dignity, integrity, honor, respect, love, courage, forgiveness, acceptance, truth, vulnerability, admit when you are wrong, and this frightens me. All the vital things that should be taught are not explained how to teach and I fear that somehow I will not be able to convey the things I want to instill within you._

_I fear that I will fail you as a father. Whether that be failing in instilling everything I want you to be—everything I have never been—or if you ever doubt my love, or god forbid, you follow my footsteps and have been raised with hate in your heart._

_If I shall, son, it was never intended because I had envisioned far much more, but as a man, I have the ability to overestimate my abilities and to err. As I have no knowledge of the future, son, I know not what the stars hold for you and me—whether that be estranged, forgotten, lost, separated, together and the circumstances of it or even the consequences of it. But whatever may come, know that I wish I could turn back the hands of time so I could whisk away your mother and you far from this world and war because whatever ugly future we are being led to will not come to pass. Son, know that I have prepared for the ugliest and I have left your mother with my letters that have attempted to convey everything I seek to teach you as a father._

Strained, "Koi, there are many things to explain to you about your father, but for now, I need you to understand how much he loves you, how much he regrets, and how much he is apologetic for because when you know your father for everything before you ever came to be, you will understand," she whispers to the child that angrily wipes at his eyes. "Because Koi, you remember watching Star Wars with Grandpa and you remember how much of villain Darth Vader was," the boy nods, "and you remember watching the hero Anakin," he nods again. "Koi, Daddy is very much like Anakin, if you were to know the reasons for why your Daddy isn't here, you would see him as Darth Vader, not as the Anakin that fell from grace."


	17. Chapter 16

**Chapter 16:**

**February 15, 2005**

His hand no longer strays to search for the warmth on the other side of the bed, seeking her soft curves nor the swollen belly cradling his child, and he no longer lays on his right ribcage to pull her into his chest as he had, nor does he lay flat on his bed with his limbs strewn about as he had as a child. His back is pressed against the brick wall, his hands tightly coiled into fists beside his face, and he awakens at the slightest noise—all very reminiscent of a soldier whom flinches at the slightest sound, paranoid. But he has every right to be in prison because he has heard of the horrors of corrupt guards in the pockets of outside forces that have allowed other inmates into cells they do not house in to violate another inmate.

She's nearly flat on her belly but her right hip digs into the mattress, her face buried into the pillow, and it's exactly as she has fallen asleep with him beside her apart from the missing weight of his arm around her and his warmth of his chest against her. His pair of silk boxers slid low on her hips but the bit of flesh exposed from his boxers is concealed by her drowning in his faded Quidditch practice t-shirt for the springtime—the three in ivory cracked like glass upon the deep green fabric.

The fluorescent light flickers to life and his eyes crack open as her eyes flutter open on their own behalf.

The blunt faucet leaks a steady drip of water unto his hands as he gives himself some preserve sponge bath, splashing the water upon his rough stubble cheeks and jaw. His fingers no longer idly reach for a bottle of cologne to pat onto his neck or aftershave and the concept of doing so seems so foreign to a man far from the schoolboy that had done so. Nor can he shave as the guard's control his access to a weapon, nor can he brush his teeth without the guard delivering it for security purposes. Neither of which can be in his possession simultaneously and must be returned within the time allotted. (*)

She drags the cigarette from the corner of her lips, dangling the tobacco between her index and thumb as she stands before the mirror scantily clad in emerald and ringlets mused from her dreams as she exhales a plume of smoke into her reflection. Religiously she balances the cigarette between her lips as she reaches for the bottle of his familiar cologne to douse her fingertips before bringing them to her nose to inhale it greedily—in this moment she resembles an addict who has relapsed and momentarily forgot how tantalizing her drug of choice had been.

_The sleeping sun has not aroused her, but the sound of trickling water from the tap that drifts in from the bathroom door ajar._

_His white oxford shirt lies across the back of the armchair sitting before the fireplace, but he's completely disregarding it for the moment as he stands in the bathroom, barefoot with his slacks hanging dangerously low on his hips with his back completely exposed to her as she shifts up to lean against the headboard, dragging the sheet with her to keep the early morning from caressing her flesh. His hands run over his throat, rubbing the cologne in, and his index finger accidently catches the gold chain around his neck as the hourglass sways over his chest from the disturbance._

_Books lay strewn open across the oak floor around the canopy bed, bustling cities of Latin America stare back up to the ceiling and distant villages in Southeast Asia glance up, forgotten in the night. Forged passports have been left by the candles, wax melted and the wicker shrunk beyond being relit—passports for a husband and wife and young child._

Angrily she exhales, but half of it is her attempt to bury her heartbreak.

**February 25, 2005**

All eyes fall upon her, maybe because she was once the sidekick of the Boy Who Lived, maybe because she's a young single mother with two children, or maybe because they remember her face from the tabloids about the father of her children. And she hears the whispers.

She tries to ignore the lewd comments as she keeps her chin up, but falters as her daughter asks her, "What's a whore?" It's but a few questions her daughter asks to be defined in a slew of exacerbating and scathing remarks and gestures thrown her away.

Sternly she responds, politically maneuvering the question, "Don't you ever let a man call you that name."

Mudblood cunt—don't ever let a man call you those things, Rose.

Spread your lips, bitch—don't let a man talk to you like that.

And the child has no idea of the other meaning apart from the lips she uses to speak with.

**March 1, 2005**

Wrangling the two wiggling children, the young mother grasps both to her ribcage on opposing sides of her small body as she stumbles to the bathroom to bathe the two troublemakers. They tug and twist in her arms at uncomfortable angles, nearly rending her in half.

At these moments, she is the most bitter about his absence because he is not here to scoop up his uncooperative son and dump him into the bath and subsequently handle the barrage of bubbles, nor is here to hold a squirming child hostage to dry them off with a towel before they leave a trail of soapy suds in their aftermath. He isn't here to threaten the children with a raised brow or crossed forearms as he leans against the doorframe and he isn't here to scold them to listen and be obedient.

He isn't here to shift the scattered toys throughout the house with his toe to avoid hazards but far too lazy to pick up the toys to deposit back into their room when it will be back in the morning, he isn't here to push them high on the swing as they want, he isn't here to sit at tea with his daughter and her teddy bears, he isn't here to teach his son to fly around on a broomstick, he isn't here to set out the plates for meals, he isn't here to only hear requests of the taste of a five year old is capable of, he isn't here to instruct the cleaning commencement after a meal, he isn't here to wake his children in the morning to welcome the grumpy and belligerent son to their overly hyperactive daughter, he isn't here to help tie shoe laces, he isn't here to read a bedtime story, he isn't here for a goodnight kiss, he isn't here for hugs and sporadic cuddling sessions, and he isn't here for so many more.

"What's a bastard?"

Her heart halts as she glances to her son as he sits calmly in the tub alongside the little girl occupied with her bubbles as she created a beard for herself.

"It's a mean name to call someone," she softly whispers to her son as she kisses his brow, knowing that she has omitted the heaviness of the label attached to the child.

"Why do they keep calling me and Rose that?"

"It's nothing you've done," she explains.

"Why?" The little girl intrudes.

"Because Daddy didn't marry me."

The boy furrows his brow and he glances down to his hands. "Doesn't he love you?"

She croaks out, "Why else would Daddy kiss me?"

"Why wouldn't he marry you?" The boy glances up to challenge his mother—he's far more observant and intelligent for his own good, or maybe it's his lack of naivety at times.

She knows the boy will never understand how hard it was to even continue her relationship with Draco in the war with the complications of a baby and his loyalties as a Death Eater. How will a child ever understand that his mother refused to marry because of his impending birth when as a little girl she had envisioned getting married for purely romantic reasons towards her husband? How could she explain that she could not marry a man that was facing time incarcerated because she feared the time he would be sentenced and if she could support him and if she could weather the storm of prison? How could she explain that she sacrificed marrying the father of her child that was being incarcerated for him to focus solely on the child they had created because that was the greater concern? How could she explain that his father felt partially obligated to marry her because it was the right thing to do for a woman carrying your seed? How could she explain the colored past of potential husband and wife? How could she explain that the bride had always pictured getting married near thirty with children shortly following and somehow all her plans were gone with the wind? How could she explain that she feared being another statistic of a divorcee?

*** Inmates have turned toothbrushes into knives and some attach the razor blade to it to make it a shiv.**


	18. Chapter 17

**Chapter 17:**

**August 4, 2008 **

"Where your Daddy at," the boys taunt, sneering at the outcast.

The outcast squares his shoulders, chin tilted up in defiance, jaw clenched nearly grinding down on his teeth as he ignores the teasing. For a moment, he never has resembled his father more as he stands opposing his foes, arrogantly and bitterly, and maybe it's in the tilt of his chin and his posture that embodies the boy from a generation ago but somehow it captures the inmate as well.

"Huh, where's your daddy?"

Knuckles graze the jaw of the perpetrator, censoring the boy from further derisive comments of torment.

"My father told me that your _daddy _is rotting in a prison cell," another boy emerges with a sneer of disgust at the act of violence perpetrated by the former victim of bullying.

"Bastard of a Death Eater," another mocks.

**August 5, 2008**

Bluntly, he demands, "Nana, where's my father? Is he in prison?"

Her lilac porcelain cup shatters as her fingers slip from her grasp at the abrupt question from her grandson as her heart halts, glistening tears threatening to spill down her cheeks because the boy's naivety has long since passed and the truth is ugly and painful for a boy to learn of especially for a father that has been absent.

"Sit," she gently coaxes the child and he takes a seat so his knees are touching his grandmother's knees and he swallows thickly with the heaviness that's stifling as his grandmother sadly smiles at him despite the gravity of everything she will tell the boy of his father's incarceration.

"Do you know what prison is?"

"The place where criminals go," the boy softly answers but his eyes are alit with blistering anger because he knows the connection that his father must be some deplorable citizen and he's been lied to about it the whole entire time again and again, but there's some lingering doubt that his father isn't this villain all the stories portray criminals to be. Unbidden tears pool in his eyes because of his frustration, torn between hate and bitterness and hope and doubt and love.

"You remember Hercules," she gently coaxes with a weary smile and though it seems completely diverting off the path of explaining to a child prison and his father's incarceration, she is trying to not condemn the father in the boy's perspective.

The boy nods, angrily smearing his tears away before they roll down his cheeks until his flesh is raw.

"Do you know why Hercules had to complete the twelve labors?"

Distinctly, the boy recalls the famed hero that had been ingrained into the walls of his bedroom at the hand of his father and weaved by his mother's tongue, yet the boy cannot fathom the reason for the hero's labors. But there's a tickling sensation as if the answer is on his tongue because he remembers being horrified that such a hero could ever fall from grace.

"His wife and children," his grandmother shakily exhales, trailing off because how do you remind a child of a hero falling from grace, an idol off his pedestal, and of how a man can murder his wife and children. "He was deceived," she backtracks, "and he slayed his wife and children."

He is silent at the revelation as he somberly absorbs this, ruminating over the connection between Hercules and potentially his father and how this all correlates to prison. "But he didn't," the boy hysterically trails off, trying to assimilate Hercules to his father and as far as he knows his father has not slain his sister or his mother. "No, Koi, he didn't," his grandmother hoarsely whispers to the child, immediately denying that connection.

"Hercules was deceived, Koi, and he did horrible things," the grandmother gently conveys her point, "He had no knowledge of what he was doing and where it was leading him towards." Contritely she retracts from the boy and she averts her gaze. "He was deceived," she hollowly murmurs, "He was just a boy," and so easily the father of this little boy is synonymous with the fallen hero, "Just a boy when he was asked for a price far too high."

"Nana," the boy interrupts with his brow furrowed, but there is a part of him whispering that she's speaking of his father and he can't help but feel so ostracized from his father—he's partially angry that he's crying over the distance between his estranged father and himself and how many voids have been left in his life that he never knew existed for such a long time and he's partially heartbroken because his family is in ruins. He's done with the lies and the omissions because he's just trying to piece together the shards that he's been grasping onto since he was but a boy that knew nothing of prison.

Sullenly, she turns to gaze at her grandson but her eyes are drowning in unshed tears and for a second, she sees her son before anything had been taken too far. "I'm so sorry," she croaks out—and it's blurred between who she is apologizing to: the boy she led astray or the boy that's paying for her sins, but those lines intertwine, or if she's just trying to atone for her sins.

"Narcissa…" It's embedded with anguish and grief as the brunette kneels before the mother of the man whom has fathered her two children, her hands gently rubbing soothing abstract designs into the back of the elder's hands, and her chin slightly tilts to the child that's angrily wiping at his tears that continue to traitorously fall.

"Koi," it's scratchy and rough as she addresses her son, "your father wasn't much older than you when he…when he did what he did to get him into Azkaban."

"What'd he do?" The boy indignantly spits at her omission.

She doesn't scold the boy for his tone and maybe it's because she understands his anger.

"Do you know why you've never met your father's father?"

The boy shakes his head, his heart sinking because he sees how broken his family truly is.

"Your grandfather devoted himself to a cause long before your father was born," she softly explains as the elder crumbles, unable to divulge and explain. "He had come from a long line of hatred and he had been misled and blinded by this hate." She pauses. "You remember Hitler from when we visited Germany last month?"

The boy nods, swallowing thickly.

"Your grandfather followed a man just as charismatic and promising and deceitful as Hitler and he did as many unforgivable things as Hitler had done," she hoarsely explains. "Your grandfather is sentenced to life in Azkaban."

"He was a Death Eater," the boy softly asks though really it's more a statement but the mother nods to confirm it.

"Your father was one too," and she heartbreakingly admits the ugly truth to her son, but the boy had already heard it. But he's just as devastated to hear it confirmed by his mother that his father was a monster. "He was just a little older than you," she's still trying to convey to her son his father's ignorance, "He was just a boy."

He nearly asks his mother if his father's sentence is just as lengthy as his grandfather's, but he doesn't because it's not a question he necessarily wants answered because he has been so accustomed to his absence that he doesn't care—or at least it's what he tells himself.

"Did he kill people?"

Her voice shakes as she denies it because she's omitting the incidents of Katie Bell, Ron Weasley and Albus Dumbledore. She's omitting his victims at the Battle of Hogwarts that she had never discussed with him and she's omitting his sins from the times between the beginning and the end and she's omitting whatever he must have done to be branded with the Dark Mark because she can surely bet that a price was required.

The boy fumbles with this because everything he had painted Death Eaters to be as monsters wilt with his mother's response and he doesn't know if he can hate his father as he does for his absence and for the things he had done.


	19. Chapter 18

**Chapter 18: **

**November 7, 2008**

"Show me the meaning of forever and together we rise," she whispers to him, tears pooling in her eyes but it's not explicitly sorrowful but there's a hint of happiness that lingers, vowing that with everything they have struggled through they shall overcame, and she gently smiles because she remembers these words from the days when she was young at the church listening to the pastor.

Her hand catches the light, the faint miniscule etchings of roman numerals inked on her left ring finger—the birthdates of her son and daughter and the father of her children—exposed to the inmate. His gaze averts to the tattoo and it's far more meaningful than a diamond upon her finger because regardless of legalities, she chose to permanently engrave her flesh with a reminder of him. It's rivaling the stretch marks across her belly that serve as reminders that she bore his children as if her womb could ever forget ever carrying his seed twice, but it's just as beautiful.

A wide smile graces his face, radiant and brilliant, and it's reminiscent to the memories of him: sheets at his waist in the aftermath, as he hovers on his broomstick, as he holds his son for the first time, as he laughs from his toes to his belly to his eyes that twinkle mirthfully, and it's something she has not rarely seen in his incarceration.

"Will that be in our vows," the words falling from his lips because he's always had the intention to marry her.

_The ocean waves kiss the shoreline as the crescent moon tilts in the night sky, strewn amongst the sea of stars above, and the two lay tangled upon the sand in the field of grass near the cottage—fingers intertwined as they lay, nothing physically intimate having occurred before, just them lying as they glance up to the heavens. _

_Her gaze is tilted to the heavens, fascinated with the constellations above and far too ignorant to notice as he traces every feature of her face—over her nose, her lips, her light freckles, her cheeks, her jaw, her chin… _

"_Why'd you ignore what happened to Katie Bell," he softly whispers in awe of the ethereal figure before him. _

"_Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future," she answers, avoiding his searching gaze. _

"_Even as I continued to…" His throat is unable to finish. _

"_Draco," she murmurs, glancing to him with tears trickling down her cheeks, "It is the hardest to turn away from the sins of those we love no matter how painful and heartbreakingly inflicting they are, no matter the blood that stains their hands, it is the hardest to stop loving someone for having been human, for being misled, for being lost, for being taught his whole life to be another, and for paying for the sins of his father." Gently, she brushes her lips against his as he quietly sits, digesting her words. _

"_Come with me," he pleads after several minutes of somber silence, his hand tugging at her hand. _

"_For what?" _

"_To the chapel." _

"_What?" _

"_Time to change your name, Granger," he smirks arrogantly, prodding her to come with him. _

"_Pardon," her brow furrows because she can almost decipher this as his proposal, though he's hardly asked and he wants to elope. _

"_If you love me, marry me," he challenges. _

"_You're underage," she hisses, "That's statutory rape," her eyes widen as she retracts her hand from his. _

"_I've already consented to your sexual abuse several times," he teases, "Why not go the whole way especially if I shall soon be abandoned by my ravishing wife?" _

"You want to get married," she breathlessly susurrates.

"We've been together for around ten years with two children, _Granger, _it's about time." He leaves out that he's been infatuated with her since fourth year at the Yule Ball and that he's been in love with her since long before she ever fell for him. He leaves out that their daughter has long since pestered him of when he will marry her mother and give her the Malfoy name officially combined with his mother's hints and pleadings to truly give her a daughter as wonderful as Hermione Granger.

"Now?" She squeaks out.

He laughs before answering dryly, "Yes in my prison garb I want to marry the girl I've loved since Hogwarts." He easily evaded any potential shocking revelations to her in regards to how long he's considered this moment with the small obscuring tactic and his sarcasm.

**December 21, 2008 **

Running beneath the swing, the mother gives her daughter an under dog, giggles elicited from the little girl, both beaming widely.

The Los Angeles sun sinks below the horizon, outlining the three figures of a mother and her two children at the beach.

The boy swings beside his sister, already having received his under dog from his mother.

"Daddy will be home soon and he'll give you under dogs far bigger than mine," the mother casually promises, forgetting that she had not told the children of their father's return in February. "He's far taller than me, he should be able to, especially after all those years of Quidditch."

"And Daddy will give you a baby," her daughter adds delightfully jolly at the news, "Nana promised he would."

She splutters at the words from her daughter—she hadn't even considered the prospect of more children after two, but she was young still and surely children were still an option, would he even want another child?

"Do you want a baby brother?" The words fall out though she's never considered another baby, but her womb tingles at the mere notion of another child to carry, or maybe it's the long absence of the farmer that sows her womb to carry the child, after all it's only been herself to release that aspect with Draco incarcerated.

The child shrugs non-committedly, "Nana wants another little girl." But her voice is soft and shaky.

"Rose, would you be jealous that the baby would have Daddy for its entire childhood," she gently asks.

Her son's swing comes to an abrupt halt.

"Koi," she heartbreakingly pleads as the child angrily clenches the chains of his swing, his back convulsing from withheld tears.

"He was never there," the boy denounces the injustice, "He wasn't."

"I know, I know," she consoles the boy, pulling the boy into her embrace, coddling as she had when he was but a baby and this all seemed unreachable to a young mother.

"_Koi," the elder softly speaks, bending down to kneel by the child, his hand rubbing the sobbing boy's back because he understands the pain of a little boy growing up without his father. He scoops the child into his lap, cradling him as he weaves a story of another little boy from a generation ago that spent the nights searching for his absent father, of a boy the was envious of his best friend for having a father, of a boy that grew up far too fast when he tried to be a man he had never seen, and of a boy raised by his mother. _

_As the story unravels to its end, the boy buries his face into his uncle's shoulder because he isn't alone. The elder hums a familiar tune he had been acquainted with in his youth: Even as a crack fiend, mama, you always was a black queen, mama, I finally understand for a woman it ain't easy trying to raise a man… now ain't nobody tell us it was fair, no love from my daddy cause the coward wasn't there, he passed away and I didn't cry cause my anger wouldn't let me feel for a stranger, they say I'm wrong and I'm heartless, but all along I was looking for a father, he was gone… * _

*Taken from Tupac's "Dear Mama."


	20. Chapter 19

**Chapter 19:**

**December 24, 2008 **

Brushing back the errant strands of his hair, the son anxiously watches his mother—softly gnawing on her lip, dark bags haunting her gaze, sanguine staining her eyes from her tears, and a worn box cradled on her lap. "I have something for you," she speaks tenderly, retracting her hand from his forehead to undo the latches on the box, lifting the lid open to reveal stacks of parchment adorned with cursive scrawl: inked confessions, hopes and wishes laid to rest, regrets and apologies haunting the space.

"His letters," the boy croaks out at the mere sight of the grave his mother has unearthed.

A small vial rests atop the letters and the mother conjures the basin for the boy to view the memory his father has left.

_His platinum locks are askew as he staggers past the front door in the waning hours before dawn. The young Draco Malfoy, just barely fifteen, drunkenly stumbles, boisterously laughing as he nearly topples, swaying dangerous, struggling to kick off his shoes at the door. _

_Pulling the shawl around her shoulders, Narcissa Malfoy shakily stands from the seat at the stairs, throat thick with heartbreak at the sight of her son, candidly the opposite of sober, but her lips are drawn tight with disproval. "Draco," she chastises him, "It's three in the morning." _

"_Ah," the boy sighs as he finally slips one foot out, ignoring his mother. _

"_Look at me," she sternly demands. _

"_I'm going to bed," the boy announces resolutely. _

_Her fingers roughly grasp his chin, harsh and unforgivingly she tilts his gaze to her scrutiny—his eyes glazed over from whatever he was used to escape and his breath tickles her nose as she wrinkles at the stench of intoxication. Her nails dig into his flesh because of her irate fury at his rebellious behavior and she's been waiting for his return for hours, unknowing and fearing the worst. Disgustedly she sneers, "You're drunk." _

_A crooked grin spreads across his face. _

"_Get the fuck out of my home," she spits, pushing away the errant child that has rubbed salt in her wounds with his smile. _

"_What the fuck!" The boy stumbles backwards, arms flaying, features twisted into rage as she grabs his collar, yanking him backwards to the door again. _

"_If your father hears about this," she mutters crossly. _

"_Fuck him," the boy spits, falling to his knee as he caters on the brink of falling face first to the floor, his hand that holds him upright preventing it barely. _

_She recoils from her son, unable to scold the child for his scathing remarks. _

"_He's not here," the boy shouts, echoing in the haunted house, "Right, ma? Where's he at? Where the fuck is my dad?" He pauses, twistedly smiling at his taunts. "Azkaban, isn't he? Got caught serving the Dark Lord, did he? Death Eater, isn't he? Convicted, huh, ma?" _

_Tears pool in her eyes because she understands the liquor he's consumed to his point—his absent father. _

"_Get the fuck out," she hisses, hands upon his shoulders so he staggers backwards, arm supporting him behind his back, still on bended knee. _

"_Look how low you've stooped," the boy disgustedly spits, "Fucking a convicted felon that isn't the shit on the bottom of my shoe." _

"_Get the fuck out," she sneers, "Guess the apple doesn't fall far from the tree." _

_Ebony swirls shift the scenery to the rose gardens, the sun perched high in the sky. _

"_Mother," the older child from previously gently speaks with reverence, but broken. _

_The hands she normally would have gently rubbed soothing patterns into remain in his lap and it's echoing how estranged they have become since that night. Hoarsely she croaks, "Yes, Draco." _

"_I was angry," the boy begins, "Rightfully so, but I never meant to take it that far and never meant to reciprocate everything upon you for things you had no blame for. I shouldn't have been at your throat when he fucked us both," she flinches at the vulgarity of his words but can't reprimand him because she's just as angry and bitter and heartbroken, "This shit's painful…" _

"_Draco," a familiar voice lingers, echoing from the house—the soothing tone of his mother—cradling a baby to her chest. _

_The wisps of the memory fade away. _

The boy's throat is parched and constricted, traitorous tears tumultuously trickling down as his mother pulls the boy to her. He was so very confused that his father had shared his anger at an absent father but could inflict the same upon his child.

Softly outpouring, the broken tune of his lullaby sorrowfully sings to the boy.

_But then of course everything always happens for a reason, I guess it was never meant to be, but it's just something we have no control over and that's what destiny is. But no more worries, rest your head and go to sleep. Maybe one day we'll wake up and this will all be just a dream…. *_

**December 25, 2008**

Under the moonlight, with her mother's wand lit at the tip, hovering near the faded parchment she holds delicately between her fingers, the daughter beautifully smiles.

_To my daughter, _

_There is something infinitely different with my love for you than for your older brother—and though I want to say that my love is equal for both my children—know that there are moments were you are so vastly different that I can't explain it to you, but should you have a son, maybe one day you will understand, or maybe your husband down the line will explain to you when you have a daughter. _

_When your mother and I had your brother, he was everything I needed as a sign of peace in a world ravaged by war, and he was somewhat planned to provide this brightness to our darkness. But you, little one, you were not conceived with some romantic idea of another child for us, but you were a blessing that you came anyway. You came exactly when you needed to and not a moment too soon or late because I was drowning in prison, but you managed to resuscitate me again when I thought of you. There was something pure and untainted about you, my daughter that your mother couldn't embody as you do or your brother couldn't. _

_Maybe it's that my love for you is far more than the depths of your brother because I must demonstrate everything your future husband will embody and I am the first boy that you will ever love and you are the first girl I fell in love with before I laid eyes on you and you have some part of me that will be preserved from everything this world can afflict it with. Maybe it is because you have made me gentle, vulnerable, and softer. Maybe it's this inexplicable need to cradle you when you scrap a knee, to holds the shards of your heart until my palms are smeared with blood so nothing will crumble it, to guard it from all that cannot offer you unconditional love, to tilt your chin up and to wipe your tears, to tell you that you are beautiful and strong so you never forget, and to mold you into a queen. But even these words cannot encompass everything I wish I could convey. _

_Little one, know that Draco Lucius Malfoy loved his daughter Theia Cassiopeia Malfoy more than life itself. _

_Daddy loves you, Rose. _

* Taken from Eminem's "Mockingbird."


	21. Chapter 20

**Chapter 20: **

**December 27, 2008 **

The boy's face submerges into the basin.

_The young mother softly covers her tender smile at the sight of the father and son asleep on the leather couch, father with his head rolling back as he exposes his neck to the son whose lips rest against his father's neck, cradled against his father's chest. The father who is still dressed in his slacks and dress shirt from court, sleeves rolled up to his elbows, lips drawn apart as he snoozes, weary from exhaustion and the trial she knows is draining. Hands against the infant's back, gently holding with delicacy, the loving father had cocooned his son in a periwinkle onesie with colorful blocks spelling out: Daddy's Best Swimmer. _

_Prying the child from his sleeping father's grasp, she accidently stirs the father that clings to his son as he awakens disoriented. "Sorry," she murmurs as she futilely concedes with leaving the infant on his father's chest. _

_Strained, "Don't," and she doesn't know if he's pleading with her to not apologize for last night or if he's referring to the peaceful slumber of their son. _

_His eyelids peel back, sanguine intertwined with the ivory that suffocate the dark coal irises. _

_It's far more than disturbing the sleeping infant and more than halting an apology. _

_His gaze is haunted and so very afraid. _

_And she doesn't understand why, but it's because he fears she will whisk away the boy before his trial reaches a verdict and she will run to the edges of the Atlas far from him because she cannot have her son raised by an ex-Death Eater and how can a boy with essentially a fatherless past ever be a father. _

"_I'm trying hard," he whispers to his son, kissing his crown softly, "to be a father." _

_Contritely, she glances away after hearing the whisper not meant for her ears as she discreetly wipes away her tears because she wants to deny everything he believes and assure him that he is not his father, but she doesn't because as we accept the love we deserve, we listen to the words we already believe even if they are lies. _

"_Come to bed," she pleads, "Even if you're mad at me." She's afraid that their time is already limited and she wants every night possible spent beside him because she knows not how long they will take him and she knows that with the stress of the trial, he needs to sleep before he crumbles. "Bring Koi if you want." _

"_I want to comb over these files," his gaze rakes over the stack of documents spread before the couch, a glass of amber liquid resting nearby and she silently acknowledges how very weary he is from this trial and how desperate he is to be acquitted or receive probation. _

"_Want me to put Koi to bed?" _

"_No," he quickly rushes out, flushing at the frantic tone of his voice, "He helps me think," he softly admits, "Gives me a reminder of the price to be paid if I don't," he trails off as he clears his throat, trying to not imagine that future, adjusting his son to be cradled in the crook of one arm as he begins his work again. _

"_Draco," she whispers, "I'd never take your son from you, ever," she vows because she sees the father clinging to the child as if it will be their last moments together, "I'd never take my son's father from my son, ever. Regardless if we don't work out, that's the past and the only thing that matters for the future is our child." _

"He was so worried, he would loose you with his conviction," the mother brokenly murmurs, brushing away her tears with her fingertips. "Should have seen the regression as the trial continued, things weren't looking so… optimistic, should have seen his desperation as the months rolled past from August to February."

The boy glances away from his mother, lost in his thoughts, trying to assimilate the man his mother speaks of to the inmate to the father in his letters.

With an understanding smile, the mother retreats to leave her son to ruminate. "I'll be in my office, but be downstairs for dinner at six, Uncle Harry will be joining us with his family."

Somehow, the boy finds himself standing in his room, facing the walls his father adorned with the faces of heroes, his fingers tracing the features of Hercules. His grandmother's words echoing about how he was easily deceived and how he was just a boy. His Uncle Harry, his Uncle Blaise, both explaining something that he would only later be able to see between the words spoken to the hidden truth and of how his father had no choice to leave him. The tears his mother shed when he asked about his father. The look in his father's eyes every time he demanded when he was coming home, the truth, why things were the way they are, and why he wasn't home.

"You weren't ever there," the boy denounces, a smoldering cloud of smoke erupts from the face of Hercules until his face is scorched and gauged from the wall of his bedroom in the boy's anger and grief. Because as much as the boy wants to understand the loving father that would have gone to the edges of the Atlas for his son, he has never met this father and has only known the father that is incarcerated all his life essentially, absent when he needed a father the most. But with his confusion, the boy crumbles to the ground, crying because all he has ever wanted his a father to be there and he's nearly had it if it wasn't for the courts, the prison, the Dark Lord, and his father's mistakes as a boy.

His kind smile greets her as she sits in her office, though in all technicality it once belonged to Lucius Malfoy to be inherited by Draco, and Harry Potter has stepped foot into the lair of the witch whom seeks to reform the penal system for its flaws in allowing the child to pay for the sins of the father. But she's frustratingly smearing her tears over her cheeks with the back of her hands as her back heaves from her sobbing because in order to explain a father to her son, she has drowned herself once again in emotions and memories long since buried to a ghost that lingers and haunts and are far too painful to relive. Warmly, he embraces her as a brother does, murmuring that everything will be all right, that she is strong, that she is a survivor, and that it is always darkest before the dawn.

"Why'd you deny his involvement with Katie Bell and Ron? You knew he was responsible," she gently asks, still clinging to him because he's her lifeline. It seems silly that she has never asked before now, but it's always lingered there in the back of her mind, but everything else has always pushed it back to the shadows.

"Back in the war, I knew you were seeing a boy, and I understood that you needed an escape from everything, I couldn't deny you that after everything you've done. I didn't know whom at the time, but I assumed a muggle, far away from this war. But I remember the night you left, I knew you were pregnant but I knew that too ask you to stay was something I couldn't do with a baby on the way. I had to let you go because you had already done far too much. I still believed that the father was a muggle and he'd whisk you away from the inevitable fate that we were walking towards. I already was grateful that he'd saved you even if it wasn't a planned pregnancy but I'd know that my sister was safe. But one night, when we were brought into Malfoy Manor, I saw something I recognized hanging from Draco's neck and I saw the fear in his eyes when we were brought in. I didn't understand right away, but I realized that he must have been the boy you were seeing, the father of your child, the reasons for all the secrets and by then, I was still grateful that he had saved you, no matter how much I couldn't believe he was a Death Eater. I think I only accepted it because of the look in his eyes that night and because of your letters. When the Battle came, his mother lied and I saved him because there wasn't a doubt in my mind that he made you happy and he would have left a child fatherless, I couldn't let some innocent child not know his father. So when his trial came, I lied because of you and your son. And by then, I understood how Dumbledore offered him a hand that night on the Astronomy Tower and why," he tells her, kissing her brow as he finishes.


	22. Chapter 21

**Chapter 21: **

**February 1, 2009 **

Footsteps echoed in the hall, unsettling the silence of the night, and his eyes flew open.

An eerie cackle resonates as the other inmates in his cellblock anxiously await fate, the intruder slips her tongue out between her teeth as she slithers past the cells, singing, "One…two… I'm coming for you…three…four…you betrayed the Lord," still cackling.

A shiver runs up his spine because he recognizes the voice of his deranged aunt.

Angry shadows dance over the walls of the little girl's room as she clings to her teddy bear, mumbling to God to protect her because her father isn't here to scare away the monsters and her mother is staying the night in Huntsville, Texas for work and her grandmother is far deep in the dark hallways of the Manor and her brother would only tease her.

He's thrown to the cement floor from his bed as he futilely struggles, kicking and shoving away from his attacker but there are two men holding him down as his aunt watches from the door, encouraging and cackling in twisted delight at the sight of her nephew. He submits the moment one painfully kneels into his back so it nearly bends in half backwards, as another slams his neck down, nearly breaking it with brute force.

The orange prison garb bottoms are torn from his legs leaving his bare ass exposed to the unforgiving coldness of the cement as he bucks again in protest.

"And make sure my Daddy has sweet dreams," the little girl prays, palms kissing and her index fingers against her lips.

Strangled from his throat, he denounces them with a slew of degrading terms but is silenced the moment, he hears a grunt of one of the men from behind, hand fiddling below his belt. His denunciations turn to violent protestations of desperate pleadings.

"Fucked a mudblood to betray the Dark Lord, didn't you?"

Mirroring the sow that the lost boys of _Lord of the Flies _had savagely suffocated, violating the innocence of their victim with incessant penetrations of knives and spears into her flesh, the two men accompanying his aunt, suffocate him as one nearly asphyxiates him from slamming his face into the cement, holding his shoulders down as the other straddles his legs before he metaphorically plunders his victim with a knife into the squirming sow beneath him. The mob chanting in mirth at the sounds of the squealing sow, lips twisted up, snarling with delight as the victim struggles until the victim's soul starts to whither.

Anguished, the sound tears from his lips as he is violated brutally and savagely, the intrusion eliciting a stream of crimson unto his ass cheeks, and he screams until his throat is parched and hoarse and even then, he's mumbling pleadings to stop this atrocity.

Contritely, the other inmates lay stoically in their beds, unable to drown out the horrific screams of anguish until he can't scream anymore, and even then, they lie with strained and contorted features of pity as his perpetrator continues to pillage him but they breathe with sighs of relief because it isn't them as selfish as it is.

**February 3, 2009 **

"Daddy," the little girl pleads, pulling on her father's hand, dragging the limp body of the inmate, eyes haunted and glazed as he lifelessly follows. "Daddy," she angrily demands because she's tugging and pulling far more than he's moving, dropping her father's hand.

Her hazel orbs glance up to the face of her father and she recognizes the weariness, the heaviness, the sadness, and the haunted-like specter that lingers. She's seen it far too many times when she has come to visit her father and she knows everything it connotes: long separations and good-byes, the past and the present as ugly as they are though little she knows, and times when her father has withdrawn himself when she has spent nights grievously trying to figure out why her daddy didn't smile at her because of something she possibly did. Though she's only a little over year younger than her brother, she is still naïve and sheltered because she doesn't want to know—she just wants her daddy. And she's seen her mother's tears over her father and she doesn't want to cry anymore than she already does for her daddy.

"What did I do," she furiously snaps, "What did I do to you?"

Her father remains distant and silent.

"Daddy, what did I do to you? Huh?"

"Rose," the mother sternly reprimands the daughter, but the grandmother gently allows this because she knows that this little girl can't keep bottling up her curiosity and her confusion and her pain any longer.

"What did I do," she hysterically sobs, "that you won't even look at me?"

Cobalt meets hazel, and though he's seeing her, he's not hearing the words she's saying. He's far too wrapped up in the aftermath of the night he was violated and the distraught of his daughter is merely another burden upon his shoulders to an ever-growing weight that's drowning him as if prison wasn't enough.

"I'm still here, Daddy," the girl continues through her salty tears that blind her, "and if you don't love me, let me go, Daddy. I'm done waiting."

There's this little voice whispering in his ear that he's always loosing, what's one more? And it's reminding of the fate of Gatsby when he couldn't let her go…

Without considering the repercussions, he bangs on the door—the gateway back to depths of his Tartarus—signaling the visit cut short because he's still a coward in some regards, back turned to his children and mother and the mother of his children.

His daughter is frantically shouting but her words fall upon deaf ears—lips angrily spewing accusations and broken promises and lies and betrayal, restrained by her broken mother that lifelessly watches his back believing that maybe this is all some sick perverse turn of events. A son tortuously glancing at his sister because he believed that his father would not stoop that low, frozen in shock. An elder blonde stands hollow and lifeless because she can't comprehend. Without a backwards glance, he leaves behind the aftermath: daughter, mother, son, and lover with a whirlwind of emotions, escorted out by guards that yank away the straggling visitors as the inmate is pulled back into his realm.


	23. Chapter 22

**Chapter 22: **

**February 12, 2009**

Lazily, he swirls his utensil around in the thick muck of scraps on his tray with his eyes still transfixed on the letter that has haunted him since he received it a few days ago. But a more keen seer would have seen how his nightmares haunted him, how he hasn't slept since the beginning of the month, how he hasn't eaten much, and how he hasn't written a letter to his children or his mother or the mother of his children or his best friend or anyone as he normally has done in his ten year sentence. Maybe they would have noted the paranoia as he flinched at the slightest intrusion to his cell and maybe they would have seen the arrogant smirks of the guards as they saw the shadow of the former Slytherin Prince.

_Draco, _

_I don't where along the way I lost you, but I've realized that together we're unfixable, there's something broken or maybe it's missing. _

_Maybe it was prison, after all ten years is a long time to oppress a man. I just…I don't know anymore. I just returned from some heavy conversations that I can't fully comprehend and maybe it's more that somehow he was so eerily parallel to you that I can't. He was condemned to die at 18 for a crime he committed at 16, and I can't help but notice how you both were far too young to be given such sentences. He's exhausted himself with the appeals in Texas because once upon a time, he was so very desperate to be pardoned and possibly another chance and maybe it was because he was still so young with far too much to see and to have left. But over the years, he's come to accept that he will be executed by the state at six o'clock in the evening and there is nothing he can do to change it, but he's a different man and he's not just a boy. The state is executing another man for the crimes of a boy. Prison aged him and maybe it's because he considers that every inmate becomes a philosopher behind bars, but it's something explicitly more than that, and maybe it's because he's had time to analyze every mistake he made, every wrong turn, every blind eye, every single time he was lost, and how it all led to his incarceration and he's not some boy that's trying to prove something, not a boy on this crusade for the color of his skin, and he's not some boy that think he's invincible and invulnerable. As he spoke, there was something so much settling that it spoke of you. _

_I know that with everything, the kids have to come first for now, and so when you are released, I'll have them until the dust settles and from there we can figure out where to go from there…wherever that is because they need a father just as much as you need them to integrate back into society. I don't know how much they will understand besides your release from prison, but hopefully they will. _

_For now, return home with your mother because you need to make amends with her after the messy web of your past together. You need the time to allow her to guide you to rehabilitation without having to worry about the children and myself and where we all stand because know that at the end of the day, I will never deprive you of your son and daughter, but first we need to worry about you. You need time to heal old wounds and mend scars long since ignored between your mother and you and we need time to heal our own. _

_Maybe when we return, we can finally unveil everything we have long since obscured and ignored because it's the only way for us to ever move forward together. It's been ten years of silence about the things that have shaped us and longer for the things we didn't talk about at Hogwarts. _

_I don't how it will work out when we return, but the kids will resume their old rooms and I'll be…wherever we decide upon because it's your room, but I'd like for us to be under a roof for the sake of the kids because this transition of your sudden presence will be just as painful as your absence. _

_To ease the gaps, I've left you memories to scour through of the children so you can somehow explain this all as I have failed to and maybe you can shed light on things I have been unable to answer. There are scrapbooks under the bed if you want to see more, and maybe you won't because it's painful to see everything you weren't there for and maybe I'm wrong but if you want, they're there. _

_Hermione_

**February 14, 2009 **

He painfully clears his throat with the discomfort as he nervously fidgets in the chair, tea cup laid forgotten, his fingers pulling at the collar of the dress shirt he's been wearing since his release hours ago, gaze darting out to the rose gardens.

Gently, his mother's hand delicately grazes his but he flinches quickly at contact.

"What happened at the last visit," she meekly prods because she's still as confused by his abrupt departure and ignorance of his daughter's distraught heartbreak.

He can't look at her without seeing hints of his aunt's face.

"Draco," she sternly demands, slight anger because she can't understand how he could disregard his daughter.

Traitorous tears glisten in his gaze.

"You'll loose them," she softly pleads, "Rose doesn't know if you love her anymore."

As broken as a leaking dam, something falters and he's crumbling to dust as his shoulders heave because this…all bottled up and hidden in the alcoves of him is…so poisonous. Maybe he's taken this too far, holding it all in since fifth year, but really it's been since he can remember. He's far too old to cry over this… but this shit's painful. But he needs to get it off his chest before they bury him.

If her heart had taken enough, it's rent further as her son divulges the very essence of everything that is so painful and she's crying because this is her little boy that she once swore to protect but look at everything that has happened…look at how much he has paid for her sins.

_Hermione,_

_Sit down, far from the children. _

She explains the monstrosity committed—the savage rape.

_Keep the children at the cottage for now. He needs time to heal alone and there are things we must relive together to heal, things the children should not be here to witness. _

_Narcissa_

"Rose, Koi," the mother hoarsely croaks, beckoning for them in her welcome arms, fresh tears running down her cheeks, burying her lips into the soft curls of her daughter's crown.

"Last time we saw your father, he had been…hurt because of something his auntie did," she tenderly and gently begins, "He couldn't let you see him like that and he didn't mean to hurt you by rushing out, but Daddy couldn't hold it together. He needed to be alone and he needed time to heal with Nana at home and soon Daddy will come join us, but please, do not hold this against him. He never meant to hurt you. There are things you cannot understand yet, nor do I wish to ever tell you because of how painful it is."

Meekly, "Is Daddy all right though?" So very timidly, the daughter asks because she's afraid of loosing him, no matter how, angry she had been.

"He's home," the boy whimsically whispers and he's lost in the childish fantasies he's always had.

"Safe," the mother assures.


	24. Interlude

**Interlude: **

**This story has been heavy and draining so I thought a nice interlude of an AU in this world I've created would ease the constraints of this heaviness for a moment until the next chapter. Kind of more like a "what if" they chose to do this and "what could have been." **

**When Hermione was pregnant with Koi, long before the Battle at Hogwarts, she and Draco fled to Brazil before they could be entangled further and have been absent from the Wizarding World since then with Draco never being convicted for his crimes as a Death Eater. **

Paddling with his belly flat against the surfboard, a tanned boy calmly floats in the Atlantic, errant strands of sun bleached platinum—if that is even possible with his light blond—dangle in his soft slate gaze, a string of seashells around his neck with the sun caressing his back with a radiant smile gracing his face because of the peace of the ocean and the sunshine.

From the shore, a gang of dark skinned, shirtless boys shout at the surfer, a beaten ball in hand, Portuguese spilling from their mouths as they jump and beckon for the boy out in the ocean, but he shakes them with a pass for later—probably joining in at sunset—and they start kicking the ball around upon the ivory beach.

Sipping her cocktail gingerly, an elder blonde watches as she leans against the stone balcony of the beach abode for the small family, her eyes on her floating grandson, her sundress fluttering in the ocean breeze and her strands of long platinum hair dancing behind her. She smiles because better days have long since come for her son when he fled the war long ago and they are living in paradise.

Carved beneath a layer of dark ink, the hidden serpent out of the skull is buried, and his forearm candidly is a canvas for a dragon, that is only visible because of the voodoo priests and a mixture of technology and incredible craftsmanship of a tattoo artist.

His toes dig into the ivory sand of the beach where several years earlier he had wed his wife, their young son as ring bearer and their little girl as the flower girl at sunset in August, the beach where they have raised their children and where their newborn will be raised, where they will die, where they escaped all the entangled past of England, where they have been reborn, where they have not paid for the sins of the father.

If you traveled through the hallways of their home, remnants of adventures are hanging up with smiling children and a happy couple, journeys through Thailand and India, treks into the Amazon, dives into the Pacific, snorkeling, hiking, traveling, smiling, and laughing. Relics of their adventures, a handcrafted wooden figurine of an elephant, the underwater camera, a trinket of a golden Buddha, and scarves of the finest silks lay in the house amongst the artifacts of the elders' lives in England.

His flesh is sun kissed in contrast to the radiant smile spread across his face and similar to his son, his hair is the same shade from sitting out on the beach to supervise the adventurous boy and the little girl exploring the coast long after the two had grown out of riding around on his shoulders with their feet dangling down or even piggy back rides as he ran down the coast or into the ocean waves to splash his children, and even from him surfing beside his son, kicking the ball around with the gang of little boys, and just taking a dip into the ocean, all absent of a tailored suit and an Oxford dress shirt, just bare chested or the occasional loose t-shirt.

His daughter squeals in delight as she runs away from the waves, tugging her sheer dress up with her hands as her curls bounce when she prances away from the shoreline, her hazel gaze alit with twinkling bliss. In vivid hues, a butterfly is painted across his daughter's cheek from some festival they had attended a day prior still, but it beautifully compliments the tropical flower in her ringlets.

His wife shrieks as the wave tickles her toes, a small camera in hand that follows their daughter to capture this moment for all eternity as it rests at the peak of her rounded belly, swollen with another life, all cocooned in a soft ivory dress that whirls around her ankles in the breeze in sync with the familiar auburn curls, though the errant strands have been tucked behind her ear by her hand adorned with a intricate diamond band. Mirroring her daughter, the mother wears an identical butterfly upon her cheek but an additional serpent that wraps around her wrist for nostalgia's sake to match her husband's lion over his heart.

He glances out to the horizon and he wonders if they had never left England, what their fate would have been? If their family would be as they are? If his mother would smile again after so long? If Hermione would be his wife? If they would have the other children after Koi?

He knows that his happiness has been at a cost, he knows not of what has happened to the wizarding world he abandoned long ago? He wonders if the Boy Who Lived ever conquered the Dark Lord again? If Blaise Zabini ever left England as he had wanted to? If his father was sentenced?

But sometimes, ignorance is bliss.

**Once again this is just a respite in the story. This never happened in **_**Apple of Eden**_**, but what if life had moved in this direction? **


	25. Chapter 23

**Chapter 23: **

**February 20, 2009**

The collar is just as itchy as it had been upon his release and the suit is just as foreign then as now, maybe it's because he still feels as if he's incarcerated and maybe it's because it's been ten years and this is what a school boy once wore and isn't this era of his life long deceased, or perhaps it's that he's sitting on the other side of the magical barrier at Azkaban as a visitor not an inmate for once in ten years.

Nervously, his mother brushes back the absent strands of his hair, pretending to smooth over the finely shaven platinum, fretting over him to distract herself because she knows not what to expect when father and son are reunited after ten years and so much history, things she doesn't want to address but bury, but she knows how much pain there is beneath and she can't hold together anymore to keep it all inside, nor can her son or her husband.

He swallows thickly because he has no idea what he should tell his father—if he should admit to his transgressions against the Dark Lord, if he should apologize, if he should yell, if he should cry, if he should…. And he feels like as if he's just a boy again that has been sent to see his father for the mischief he got into at home, but that's from another time before things fell apart, and now they are so estranged.

"Cissa," and his gaze lifts up from the metal table to the inmate that has stiffly sat down, dark bags hang from his silver orbs with his features gaunt and gruff from the unshaven face to contrast with the long absent strands of platinum he had once been known for, wrinkles of worry and fear etched into his exhausted face and somehow it all resembles the once proud Lucius Malfoy.

His mother softly smiles but it's restrained and heartbroken after everything her family has paid for his sins, but she loves him through all the flaws.

The father glances to his son and halts because he has no words to say and maybe it's because he's so sorry for how everything has crumbled and he's still too proud to outright apologize and he's still set in some of his old ways that he was raised with. "You've been released," he exhales.

Draco chokes out a conceding, "Yeah."

"Home for almost a week," the mother softly murmurs, fidgeting with her son's collar.

"And the children," the father inquires because he remembers his return and transition back home from his first conviction, but he hesitates to mention it when he has never met his grandchildren and he doesn't know how sensitive the subject is.

The son flinches at the mention.

"Staying with their mother," she whispers and her eyes convey everything the inmate needs to understand how tender it is.

Somberly, the inmate hesitates to somehow attempt to soothe his estranged son because he remembers long ago when his son was but an infant and he was pulled away by his mother in his trial and over the bang of the gavel, he heard his son's shrieks. He still has no idea what he should say, so he remains silent.

For the son, it's far too surreal to be sitting on the other side and far too alien to be visiting the father he hasn't seen in ten years, especially with a father that he doesn't know how he perceives him: if he forgives him, if he hates him, if he loves him, if he's trying to reconcile with him, if he's saying goodbye, if he's saying hello. He hasn't been able to forgive the man for his sins that he has paid for and he hasn't been able to forget his fifth and sixth year. But it's his father…

"If you had the chance," the son whispers gravely, "to turn back the hands of time, would you undo everything?"

Though he wouldn't kneel to the Dark Lord because of his sudden revelation that mudbloods are not inferior to him, he wouldn't because he's seen how much his son and wife have suffered from his doing so. And as much as he loathes that his grandchildren are halfbloods born to a mudblood mother, they have his blood running in their veins and no Malfoy should ever be raised as if bastards.

"Yes," and he omits everything that he knows would exacerbate their situation and the son doesn't have the bravery to ask for clarification because he knows there are things he doesn't want to have answered.

Along the coast of France, a boy whom similar to his father is struggling to assimilate his father to the past and how he perceives his father scours through the letters left to him as he pours over every inked word as he sits upon the beach just outside of the cottage where his father and mother had secreted away to in the war. But it's increasingly difficult to assimilate a father from memories in a pensieve and letters to a inmate that abandons his children days before his release and he understands something horrifically painful happened to his father that he walked out but he doesn't understand really because once again everything is so shrouded and obscured.

The boy's little sister has spent nights crying because of her guilt over that day she confronted her father but she's just as confused and just as angry and just as lost. She's wondering where he's been and why he hasn't written yet. She's wondering why she's waiting again.

An owl swoops into the kitchen, a letter in its talons to deliver to the brunette whose eyes watch her son as he sits outside to her daughter kneeling to collect seashells.

She laughs as she reads the letter because it's so assuming and it's hardly a question of invitation on his behalf, but it's just as arrogant as he once had been because he assumes her answer will be yes.

Pouring out into his cupped palm, a little periwinkle pill rests and with a quick glance, one would have seen a heart carved out of the center of the pill but to the trained eye, it's the letter v, and he chases this pill down with a swish of water from the faucet of his bathroom.

As he leaves the bathroom, after tucking the little canister of pills away from potential prying eyes, he whisks up the glass with the bottom rimmed in amber liquid, tipping the glass as he polishes off the remnants of his drink before he slips into the barren bed that long ago he remembers cradling a brunette and occasionally a little baby that the mother clung.

But it's not just his bed that's a tomb, it's the closet that holds the very fabrics of his past life and it's just as haunting to see how much has changed and how there are so many that linger with the essence of memories from the war. This whole Manor is a tomb and it's so suffocating to be here that he can't wait until he's at the cottage again come sunrise.


	26. Chapter 24

**Chapter 24:**

**February 21, 2009 **

Curled up in an armchair, calves tucked under her bottom as she gently bobs her head along to the music from the relic of a phonograph, still dressed in her pink checkered pajama shorts and a drowning long sleeve with a fading image of Minnie Mouse with her curls piled above her head in a bun, her hazel gaze obscured by a thin layer of flesh because it's early in the morning and she's solely listening to the words religiously.

Her mother flips meticulously through the library of albums because she's sharing the songs her mother played when she was a little girl, the very songs she was raised on to pass the legacy to her daughter, and she's smiling because for once this tradition is something not sorrowful or painful to pass down, and maybe it's because she's stumbled upon Michael Jackson.

Following the music, the son finds his mother and sister, listening to the phonograph that he had no idea still functioned and he leans against the doorframe as his mother swings her hips, laughing because she hasn't done this since the Yule Ball, and his sister is giggling because her mother's laugh is contagious and it spreads to him as he chuckles heartily.

As dawn fades to afternoon, the sun rising higher in the sky, the little family ambles away from the phonograph to the kitchen with the music still trickling in as the mother continues to sway her hips as she rolls out the dough, the daughter giggling as she stirs. Though his arms cross over his chest in a somewhat disproving pose as he gently shakes his head at his mother whom he has never truly seen so young and free but he's hiding a crooked smirk behind a thin set of lips as he tilts his chin down, his gaze checking that lens is still pointed at his dancers with the camera tucked beneath his left elbow in his right hand as he leans back against the fridge.

He lifts his gaze back up to his mother and he truly sees her—for everything she has sacrificed and in some ways he's still too young to understand everything she has done and all she has weathered, but he knows just how young she is and how she's only finally been able to be something she should have been long ago. He's heard of the girl besides the Boy Who Lived and he's heard how she helped bring about the fall of the Dark Lord with his horcruxes because Hermione Granger was a heroine, and she went down this path at eleven years old and she hasn't been a child and she never was a young adult because she was a mother so young. She's twenty-nine years old and she's never felt it, nor has she felt eighteen or sixteen or twenty-five because all along she's felt so weary and worn from the days before the war.

From the other entrance of the kitchen, leaning against the doorframe, the ex-inmate and ex-Slytherin and ex-Death Eater, whatever label you decide to attach to him, is watching her because he sees just as his son does and her smile as she dances is reminiscent of the Yule Ball all those years ago when for that moment she felt young and free and there wasn't a burden for her to shoulder.

He swallows thickly because it's far too much to see her so lively and happy without him because she still hasn't acknowledged his presence and somehow seeing his children and her together so blissful, it's taunting him of everything that could have been.

"Daddy," his daughter shyly asks as she abandons her mixing to hug her father, his arms, as if instinct, welcome her as she buries her face into his belly, still far too short to reach his chest, but he's perfectly happy because she's still his little girl. "You're safe," his daughter mumbles, still far too worried over what her mother has told, the little she has, and the rest she has filled in with horrendous and monstrous proportions, but he' too cowardly to admit or give any inclination of what happened, "I'm home."

Her eyes rake over his figure, abandoning her dough, and she's scouring him for any sign of weakness or injury because she has spent these nights up haunted by the bruises that must mar him and she can almost hear his screams and she breathes out a sigh of relief because to the eye, he's unblemished. Maybe she sighs because finally he's home to be with his children and she sighs because she didn't know how this homecoming would pan out with the children he left behind, but she's still waiting for their son and she's ever worrisome and anxious, so she waits to greet the man she's known since he was eleven.

"You're home," his son murmurs in disbelief because there was always a part of him that believed his father would never come home from prison and he's never been able to picture his father before him without a prison involved between them. "You're home," and any trace of anger that his parents would have expected is absent, but it's drowning in some shade of sadness and happiness. Before anyone can process that nothing expected has happened, the son is brushing away errant tears from his cheeks so no one can see he's crying.

His daughter pulls away to embrace her brother and leaving her mother a moment to be selfish and to welcome the man she has waited ten years for.

Her lips brush against the shell of his ear as she stretches up on her toes as she wraps her arms around, her hands roaming over the expanse of his back for bruises she can't see.

"Are you okay?"

It's the simplest question to ask but the hardest to answer, maybe it's because of the vulnerability of candidly answering the question and maybe it's partially because she's far too close for a man deprived of this contact for ten years, and anything experienced in visitation was reserved with the children's presence.

"The doctor prescribed me Lunesta," and he's lying, "and I've been sleeping like the dead."

It's the only response she will get that will allude to what happened and she knows he won't be so open about this, so she falsely believes this is the truth.

He'll lie because he doesn't want to admit how bad it really is that he's been prescribed something far more powerful than what he's said, but at least he's been somewhat truthful and it's better than lying when he's only omitting.

She kisses beneath his jaw before his lips as if to silently convey that she's there for this recovery and then she retracts because in some ways it's strange to resume intimacy like this again after ten years when so much has changed and she isn't sure if there are still residual effects from his violation, if he'll pull away because of a flashback.

Their daughter has resumed stirring in somber contemplation and their son has moved by his sister's side with his fingers sifting through flour, drawing abstract patterns with a furrowed brow, it's evident that the moment of absolution for their last visit was forgotten in the overwhelming moment to make sure he was safe and that he was home for once in their life that they remember.

"Rose, Koi," their mother meekly whispers because she sees it too. "Why don't you go with your father and I'll finish up in the kitchen?"


	27. Chapter 25

**Chapter 25: **

**February 21, 2009**

He trails behind his daughter and son, their fingers intertwined in some assurance of strength, as they guide him out to the beach, sitting down in the sand together side by side, her head against his shoulder as his arm pulls her in close and he sits down near them, but no where close enough that he could lift his hand to touch them. Maybe it's prison's influence that makes him so hesitant to physical touch after an overwhelming welcome or perhaps it's because he doesn't really know what to say to heal these wounds.

It was far easier to write letters to an infant and far easier to write letters beyond bars to children too naïve to understand and it's far easier to not talk about these things, he knows this. But he can't leave it like this.

"I've read your letters," his son murmurs and a weight has been lifted because some of the things he knows he can't ever openly say to his children have been heard.

"All of them," he chokes out because he still doesn't know what to say.

The boy nods because his throat is constricted and maybe it's all this time of never really having a moment alone with his father to ask him everything he's ever wanted to that he can't decide what to ask and all the heaviness of everything he's experienced is almost muzzling.

"Do you have questions?"

The son nearly laughs because how could he not.

"Are you gonna stay with us," his daughter asks because she is still just a little girl that doesn't quite understand this adult world. She doesn't know how to ask if he'll return to where he came from, if he'll go back to prison. She's afraid to ask if he'll live with them at home because he never has.

"Always," he vows.

It's all she needs before she curls into her father's neck and side, cradled against him despite his uncomfortable stiff posture because after ten years of no contact apart from a few sporadic visits, it's strange, but he quickly tries to adapt to pull her closer because he doesn't want to be reminded of prison ever again.

He hums a lullaby to her, the same lullaby he once sang to a pregnant belly before he ever knew inside was a little boy and he believed it was a little girl, "Hush, little baby, don't say a word. Papa's gonna buy you a mockingbird. And if that mockingbird won't sing, Papa's gonna buy you a diamond ring."

The son glances over to his father and sister in the moment shared between them and he's almost envious of his sister for so easily accepting their father, but it's something beautiful and it makes him smile because his little sister has never been happy so easily by something like this.

"Dad," the boy whispers and his father glances up to him, "I understand." It's an omission because there are parts of these letters that aren't tangible to him yet, things he can't comprehend yet, things he can't quite understand why his father has said these things, but he's trying to understand and he knows just how much his father loves him and for now, that's enough.

The son's shoulder brushes his father's free shoulder as he settles down beside his father as he shares a small smile with his father and it's enough to say that scars are mending between them.

The former inmate looks to the horizon, vast and open as it is, and he's never been more appreciative to see such a welcoming unknown. He should be afraid of what's to come, but he isn't, not really, because he's adjusted to the unknown with his incarceration, he's not exactly okay with the unknown but better days linger ahead.

Maybe he'll wife the mother of his children after all this time, not just because her womb has carried his seed, but because of everything else she has done as a guide to him in this life. He's always known she's been beautiful and smart and strong and good. He's known her more than half his life and it'd be ridiculous to somehow not continue legally together until death, or whatever existed after death, and it's somewhat crazy to try to see a life without her when they have children together. But he isn't sure if this is the time to marry her, but someday he will, he can see it, and maybe it's arrogance but he knows.

He'll be home for the Christmas holidays and for the summers spent together when his children go off to Hogwarts and whatever trips abroad they take, whatever memories they make, and however they spend them. He'll be there for the welcoming home pick up from the train station and the dropping off goodbyes and he'll be there for packing up their suitcases and he'll be there for the letters sent home and letters returned. He'll somehow work out a way to visit for Quidditch matches and he'll coincidently end up at Hogsmeade for a butterbeer. He'll be there at Diagon Alley for school supplies and he'll spoil his children discreetly behind their mother's back.

His son isn't looking out to the horizon like his father, but his gaze is struck down to the sand, but he's caught a slight bit of ink upon his father's forearm from the sleeve not extending down all the way and he knows what he's looking at despite the body of it being concealed. He's trying to understand, he really is, but it's increasingly difficult when the ex-inmate still is branded by his past.

The little girl is transfixed by a slight scar on his throat and wonders how her father got such a scar as she gnaws on her lip because to be maimed like that isn't an accident. She knows scars are touchy subjects, she learned that lesson long ago when she had asked her Uncle Ron what his scar meant—why _blood traitor_ had been carved into his flesh so crudely. She wonders if this is where her father was hurt, but she doesn't dare ask, instead she kisses it because her mother has always kissed her injuries so they'll feel better.

He shifts his gaze to his daughter, nearly forgetting of the scar there with so many on his chest from sixth year, but he smiles because in so many ways, she's just like her mother and he couldn't be more grateful that she isn't like him.

"Don't grow up too fast on me, Rose," he mumbles to her, kissing her crown with his lips in her ringlets. There's some part of him afraid that because she's far too much like her mother in some regards, she'll somehow find the next role of heroine when she gets to school and she'll never have a regular journey through school. He doesn't want her to be any older than she already is because he knows that path and he'd never choose it again. Not when he just got his little girl either.

She giggles slightly because to her it's an absurd request for her father or any adult. "Don't worry, Daddy, I won't," she acquiesces, and there's a part of him that doesn't believe her, though he smiles at her—it's not just because he knows she will grow old, it's something far more than that but he doesn't know what yet.


	28. Chapter 26

**Chapter 26: **

**February 21, 2009**

It hadn't started out sexual or intimate—she'd drawn a bath for him to soak in, mixed with medicinal potions she had brewed, she fiddled with her fingers as she glanced down as he stripped to get in the tub, he relaxed into the tub as he rested the back of his neck against the edge as he sunk further while his legs stretched out and he wasn't embarrassed to be seen by her, she kneeled by the tub before she took a seat beside him after passing him a glass of red wine, they drank a little both unaccustomed to alcohol, and she ended up examining the scars on his flesh again and somehow she ended up in the tub with him still dressed until she stripped out of her soaked clothes.

Her ass is sitting on his shins and her legs stretch out with her feet on either side of his waist and she's tucked all her unruly curls up into a bun with a few strands tickling the nape of her neck and he's still reclining in the tub, trying to not stare at how beautiful she is. And he's trying to not remember times spent in the tub together from before his incarceration, both when she was pregnant and when she wasn't.

"Where do we stand," she shyly asks.

She isn't sure if she wants him to say they're together or not—she's been with him for more than ten years and he's the father of her children and she can't see herself marrying anyone else, but then again, she's only ever dated two men in her life and slept with one. She isn't sure if she knows what love is but she feels guilty to deprive her children access to their father 24/7 if she breaks it off with their father because she's acting as if she was a young twenty year old girl that isn't done experimenting and exploring for love. But she knows that when she gets married, it's for real, it's all eternity, it's not some on the whim or doubtful hesitancy if she loves her husband.

Then she giggles because she's tipsy and she's sitting naked in a tub with him as if that doesn't explain everything and to anyone else she knows what it would look like.

As a Malfoy, he isn't letting the mother of his children walk away and he certainly isn't letting the girl who has seen far too much of him vulnerable go either.

"Together."

She won't dare dive into if he's ready for marriage or not because she isn't sure if she's so sure about this anymore. There have been so many secrets between them in the past and so many tears she's shed.

She scoots closer to him as her lips caress his because for now, that's enough for her.

She retracts with her hands still on his thighs, dangerously close to his hips, and her ass is against his lower thighs and her belly is nearly parallel with his stomach—and fuck she's more beautiful this close than she was.

She's drunk and she's bolder than she had been earlier in the day with intimacy—it's been ten years since she has had a partner.

"Do you want more children," she whispers softly, but it's more a plea.

Without conscience, he glances to her smooth belly beneath the water and he can see the faint stretch marks as engravings that she's been claimed by him and that she bore his two children and there's something tantalizing about that prospect of her carrying a part of him inside her for eighteen months. Maybe it's far more tantalizing because he's spent ten years without her, just his hand and whatever memories he's pulled from the back of his mind and whatever he's conjured, and here she is in the flesh.

"I want another baby," her lips graze his throat and trail down to his collarbone.

For her, it's the idea that she'll be loosing her oldest baby when he leaves for Hogwarts in the fall and she's still young enough to have another little one.

He chokes out, "Yeah."

Their daughter shrieks from down the hall and as if it's her cue, the tease slides off his lap and exits the tub, swinging her hips as she enters the bedroom through the adjoining door, leaving him to tend to their daughter. He crawls out of the tub, wrapping a towel around his waist, forgetting about the monstrous Dark Mark as he follows his daughter's shriek to find her teetering on her bed, frantically muttering about a spider.

When he finally returns back to the bedroom, she's no longer naked, but his faded Quidditch shirt is hanging down to her thighs and she's curled up into the pillows with a crimson blush spread across her cheeks with a sobering potion at her bedside table and her bun is undone with soft ringlets fanning out. Her gaze is downcast because she knows that she wasn't ready to resume those affairs so quickly.

"I'm not used to drinking," she meekly explains, "I don't usually with the kids and all."

"I haven't since my incarceration," he adds, trying to ease whatever this is and though she smiles, it's strained.

"You have to give me some time, I've spent a decade without you."

He nods because what the fuck else is he supposed to say to that and he's biting his tongue from any snappy retort because he's not necessarily angry with her.

He spins on his heel because he isn't sure if she's ready to share a bed, perhaps his plan of staying the night was too fast and he should go back to the Manor.

"Aren't you coming to bed," she brokenly asks because after all this time, she's still sleeping as if he's right there beside her, and for once in ten years, she wants him to really be there.

"Of course," he tells her, swiping a pair of briefs she's left at the edge of the bed for him to change into, letting the towel drop to the floor.

With wandless magic, he grabs the pill bottle, sitting at the edge of the bed, pouring out a small pill into his palm before he pops into his mouth. She's far too trusting to not glance at the bottle in hand to discover his lie and unsuspicious as he sends the bottle away back to its hiding place in the bathroom instead of the bedside table where she can easily read its label. But then again, the bottle is just the container he transferred his prescription into after he threw out the empty blister packaging. Nor does she question the combination of alcohol and medication either and perhaps it's a moment of carelessness and forgetfulness.


	29. Chapter 27

**Chapter 27: **

**March 9, 2009**

He slips off to the bathroom in the bedroom as she's out enjoying the sun, keeping vigil over the kids as they prance about in the sand.

His fingers deftly open the white box and pour out the blister packaging for his medication beside the generic orange pill bottle he stores it all in. Quickly, he pops out all the little rounded pills from their bubbles and sweeps them away into the bottle, the torn aluminum exposing the empty slots and making the medication's name illegible: Valium.

He grabs the box and the blister packaging and shoves the empty packaging into the box before he snaps his finger for a house elf from the Manor.

"Dispose of this discreetly," he whispers to the elf as it bows obediently.

**March 14, 2009**

His legs are stretched out and resting atop of the coffee table as he reclines in the armchair, casually sipping a green glass bottle of some American beer with a strange German name.

The sun has just barely sunk beneath the horizon and they've been sitting watching movies since lunch, but they've been relaxing since Hermione headed over to London for a few days to work on some project with Boy Wonder Potter.

He glances at his kids, happily munching away on pizza, and he's assured that they're old enough to be left alone for a few hours before they head up to bed, but he's perfectly fine if they crash out here, too lazy to go off to bed.

He over-emphasizes a yawn and his daughter glances back at him.

"Go to bed, Daddy, you're tired," she tells him with a soft smile.

Maybe some part of him should feel guilty, but he's an insomniac or he faces the haunting echo of his deranged aunt's laugh in his nightmares if he doesn't.

He keeps his beer in hand, not willing to leave it for curious children, and he tenderly kisses his daughter's brow and his son's before offering his final cop out of goodnight and sweet dreams.

As he ambles down to his bedroom, he tips the beer back, still drinking because he's only a bit tipsy and he's just going to bed anyway. If she was here, he'd never drink so openly like this and he's pretending that somehow he's a bachelor and these are the last days he'll get to do this sort of thing. He gently kicks the door shut with his heel and shuffles over to the bed before he sets the beer down on his bedside table, trading it for his wand to lock the door to prevent intruders.

He pulls open a drawer in the bathroom, sifting through some of his shit of extra sticks of deodorant and bottles of cologne and aftershave and some other necessities, until he finds the pill bottle and uncaps the little white lid, pouring out a few into his palm. He dumps them on his tongue as he heads back out to his bed, his fingers wrapping around the neck of the bottle at his bedside table to chase the medication.

He slumps back on his bed, carefully stretching out onto his bed, not bothering to strip out of his clothes, waiting for the lethargy to kick in before he's dead to the world.

**March 30, 2009**

Her bare back is to the mirror in the bathroom, her curls sticking to her backside beneath the stream of the shower as she lathers her legs in soap when he slips into the steamy bathroom.

"Draco," she asks without turning around or craning her neck because she inexplicitly trusts him and she feels safe at home.

"Just brushing my teeth," he lies, his hand on the drawer holding his pills, but halts to turn on the tap before he opens the drawer to retract the bottle from its hiding.

"I've noticed you're sleeping better," she idly comments, "Medicine is working and soon you won't need it," and it's so fucking optimistic he doesn't unscrew the cap. Part of him isn't so proud of these self-induced dreams but the other half of him is saying the medicine is working and it's helping him sleep and soon he won't need it, just like she says.

Concerned, she cranes back to glance at him, "Draco?"

By the time she's glanced at him, he's just barely slipped the bottle back into its drawer and has grabbed his toothbrush, letting it dangle between his lips, carefully turning to glance at with his a quirk of his lips.

She laughs because she never realized how much she missed these rare moments when he was just another human being—he's not some inmate with a rigorous stiff set of instructions and prison garb, he's not the pretentious and snobby little boy from their first few years, and he's not the school boy that strolled about the grounds in tailored suits either.

"You're such a dork," she teases, twisting in the shower so her back isn't facing the mirror as she turns her attention to her hair, completely comfortable with him because things have fallen back into place from before he was incarcerated, but partly because she's older and a mother and naked bodies isn't new and having a former over-active little boy that sometimes streaked around the Manor made nudity not so foreign or uncomfortable. She shouldn't even be shy when he's the father of her two children anyway. "You missed out at lunch today when I took the kids to Paris for a quick bite," and her eye lids fall shut so she doesn't notice his slight flinch, "Rose saw the ballerinas and now she's determined that's her calling."

He hadn't intended to skip out on lunch with his kids after he was the one to promise a bite in Paris with them, but he didn't realize just how long he'd be knocked out with his quick induced nap with a swig of Nyquil chased by some liquor he found in the high cabinets out of reach of the ex-Gryffindor. But he was exhausted and drained from the morning spent swimming in the ocean.

"Didn't realize how drained I was," he comments, turning back around as he runs water over the toothbrush that never had toothpaste on it in the first place.

"Getting old," she teases with a giggle.

He forces a laugh.

He nearly doesn't reach for the little pills but he's afraid of the nightmares that wait if he doesn't.

The water shuts off and she steps out, dripping wet, but before she reaches for a towel, she presses up against his back and kisses between his shoulder blades. "Love you," she mumbles.

He opens the drawer as she leaves the bathroom to slip into his old Quidditch shirt as always and some panties.

He pours out a few pills into his palm and quickly knocks them down before she comes in to drag him off to bed and catch him.

Maybe it's a guilty conscience but he's far too cowardly to confess to such a thing.


	30. Chapter 28

**Chapter 28: **

**April 6, 2009 **

Her index finger traces the rim of her glass of red wine as he casually sips a bit, waiting for her to begin the conservation as they sit across from each other at the counter in the kitchen, avoiding bathtubs from the last time because this can't end with sex and it can't be resolved by anything close to that.

She knows they need to talk about their sixth year, things they never dared talk about then because it was far too painful to speak of attempted murder and the Dark Lord and allegiances and the future, but it's far too long to leave this unspoken and she knows it can't be healthy. She knows they need to talk about how much anger and fighting there was during his trial and how ugly that period was, but she doesn't want to revisit that era because it's so colored with confusion and anger and bitterness and forlorn hope and desperation. She knows they need to talk about his incarceration because that's just as tainted as these other periods and it's far more scaring with the children. But it's been so long, and she knows how hard it is to dig up old graves and how painful it is. She knows she can't continue with these skeletons her in closest anymore.

"I can't do anymore secrets." It's blunt but it's fucking honest.

He pulls his lips from his glass as he carefully sets it down, nodding his chin slightly because he can't let her go, not after everything, but he can't exactly promise this honesty.

He still hasn't had the fucking heart to tell her he wasn't prescribed Lunesta like he said he had been.

"I know," and it's hoarse because he understands and he feels so fucking guilty but he just can't.

She's waiting for him to tell her something, anything really, she doesn't give a fuck from what period of their time together or if it's something from long before she knew him that he tells her—just something.

Her fingers dance over the neck of her glass of wine.

"I started smoking," she whispers, "I haven't smoked for a long time until this morning."

It's so easy for him to whisper that he hasn't taken anything for a self-induced snooze since last night, but he doesn't.

"Why," he croaks out.

"For the same reason I began when you were incarcerated and I was just a single mother with a little boy and a little girl. I don't like whatever we are."

His heart twists at the last part.

"I was angry at you," she softly continues, averting her gaze from him, "I was bitter and I was trying to mend together everything that had fallen apart. I wasn't supposed to be a single teen mother with the baby daddy incarcerated. I loved my babies but I'd never rewind the hands of time to relive that or choose that path again. There are days when I can't believe that the father of my children is a felon and narrowly avoided being a war criminal and I resent myself because of who you are for my children's sake. They've paid for my sins," the words are torn from her lips, dragged through her teeth to his ears.

He grits his teeth because he won't lash out against her when he's felt this same disgust with his reflection.

"I was so young to be involved in such a messy and complicated relationship and then prison was thrown in with children and it was like God said fuck you," she harshly breathes out, "For ten years, we weren't really together, you know that," it's broken, "Everything in those ten years was for the sake of the kids, not us."

"We had to be a father and mother," he offers in understanding because he knows, he felt this wound being prodded and pulled the whole time. "All at the price of whatever we were or could have been."

"Even now," she bitterly laughs, "It's about you trying to fill this void of their childhoods and assimilate into their lives as a father that you've never truly been." She doesn't mean it as an insult and he knows.

"When you were incarcerated, I should have put more effort into us, trying to salvage us so we had a future," she murmurs and for a moment she's terribly selfish and she wonders if she hadn't been so adamant with her work for other children to not have to grow up like her own with their fathers behind bars, if they would be here now?

Somber silence settles because they both aren't quite sure what to say, where to go, what to do.

_Her hands frustatedly grip her hips, her thumb digging into her pelvis bone and her brows are furrowed slightly with her hazel gaze searching down the corridor as she mumbles about slippery frogs. Her lips purse together and conceal the two teeth she's insecure about already and in this stance, she's not exactly cover girl beautiful, but there's something there. _

_He slinks out of the compartment leaving his childhood friends to continue chattering away about trivial and silly things and he leans against the wood separating his compartment and another as he watches the girl he had seen earlier before he bade his mother and father farewell until Christmas break. _

"_What are you doing," he curiously asks her, but it's tainted by exasperation. _

_The interrupter of her chain of thoughts is irritatingly standing there with his arms crossed over his chest with slicked back hair that is far too stiff for her liking, not to mention the slight curve of his lips as he finally gets her to notice him. _

"_Helping," she vaguely answers. _

"_With what," he quickly retorts as she shifts her gaze away from him. _

"_Just a boy." She doesn't even bother to face him as she speaks. _

"_A boy?" His tone is almost angry. _

"_He's lost," she mumbles something else after that but he doesn't hear it when she kneels down to the ground, still ignoring him. _

"_And you're helping him why," he drawls, gesturing with his hand for some reason to help a fool. _

"_Why shouldn't I?" _

_He grips the bridge of his nose because she's frustrating him with these responses given. _

"_Is there a benefit for you?" _

"_There doesn't need to be." _

"_You're doing it out of the goodness of your heart," he teases and she fiercely snaps her face back to him. _

"_We're all we got in this world," she snaps at him before she slips into another compartment, leaving him alone. _

They've both traveled back to the first time they met in that corridor of the train, meandered through memories of school and their year of non-attendance to Hogwarts, and somehow they're trying to figure out where everything went and how things ended up here.

"I shouldn't have let you turn a blind eye in sixth year."

For him, that's the crucible of all faults, of where they went wrong, where everything began to fall apart.

"I should have seen where this was going long before you already had the Dark Mark," she refutes. "But I thought that if I was smart enough, if I was adept enough as a witch, if I was powerful enough that you'd see there wasn't any difference between us."

He glances to her and he sees her, deep into her soul. He sees everything that Albus Dumbledore once said about her on that night in the Astronomy Tower and everything he never heard from the headmaster. He sees everything that her mother and father saw in her as a little girl that loved far too much. He sees why Harry Potter let her go when she found out she was pregnant with her firstborn. He sees her, truly. Fuck, she's beautiful and it's far beyond her skin. He knows why he loves her and he knows he's seen all this a long time ago, but…

He looks away because he sees the pain and he sees her tears, how far they have carved into her and the depth of their stains on her.

She lifts her eyes up to him and she heavily exhales because this is her story weaved with his. But she knows how far their story has disintegrated to with his incarceration.

**April 7, 2009**

She's wrapped up in her father's embrace like she was a little girl again and he's cradling her as if she were fragile and susceptible to combust into grains of sand or dust.

He rocks her without spilling his thoughts that he always knew this boy would inflict this because he knows that as much as he doesn't want her to love this boy, she does because she loves far too much. He's known this ever since she was a little girl but he never knew the consequences of what it might bring about one day down the road.

"Hermione," he murmurs in her curls, but he isn't sure what he should say because he's never been good with trying to broach these subjects of magic and her world so foreign to him and he's still struggling to cope with how much he's seen his daughter and grandbabies cry over this boy. But he's seen love fade and recede with couples in his life. "Love is not what you can predict," he softly murmurs, "love isn't always there for you to see and sometimes love is always there. Love stays and sometimes it can't and sometimes it shouldn't stay. Love arrives exactly when it is supposed to and leaves exactly when it must. But Hermione, when love arrives, welcome it, and when it leaves, ask it to leave the door open behind it for love to come again." *

*Taken from "When Love Arrives" by Sarah Kay and Phil Kaye.


	31. Chapter 29

**Chapter 29: **

**April 30, 2009**

The jeans ride low on his hips without sagging off his ass nor are they horrendously tight and clinging to his legs or overly baggy, but the dark denim is somewhere between too tight and too baggy as it loosely flows as he walks, a muggle contraption of technology in his pocket at the request of the mother of his children that has its outline visible when his strides are far when the fabric stretches to its limits. His black t-shirt is loose around his stomach and stretches down a bit past his belt, but it doesn't hide the limits he exerted upon his body, especially his upper torso in prison, but it also exposes the only tattoo adorning his body as thick and black as it is.

His hand rakes over his head, fingers combing through his hair, oblivious to the prying eyes of the media as they note him crossing the street to the known address of an ex-war heroine and more prominently the mother of his children, recently relocated back to London and having moved out of the Malfoy Manor.

Their cameras were already pointed to the brunette as she stood vigil over her daughter and son just outside her front door, the little girl riding the street on a bicycle as the boy was off with a couple of the neighborhood boys with a basketball in hand.

His hand snakes around her waist, a little low to be just friendly but not necessarily romantic, as she stretches up on her toes, a hand bending his neck lower with the other resting on his chest as she whispers something in his ear. She lowers off her toes back to her heels and he drops a kiss to her forehead, her hands pull away but he gently moves his hand to her hip and ushers her to the side as he slips inside the home.

An observant watcher notices the ink upon her ring finger as she scratches her jaw and he instantly raises his brow because the last time Hermione Granger was seen, she certainly did not have any tattoos.

The mother says something to her daughter, brow creased in thought, and then she swiftly pushes her front door with her palm and ducks inside, closing the door with her heel but the watchers hear her call his name before it closes.

They wait patiently for the former couple, though some suspect otherwise, to return to their sights.

The front door cracks open and together they exit the house, hips brushing and his hand reaches back to shut the door before she can turn around to do so, but she does without knowing he would so she's facing his chest, a fraction away from his body.

Once again, his hand finds her hip and he moves her to the side as he gets off the porch, but before he gets off the steps, his fingers catch her wrist in a soft grip and he cranes back to her with a knowing smile.

"Stay at the Manor with me," it's loud enough that it travels to the watcher's ears. "This is unnecessary."

She mumbles incoherently to the watcher's ears.

He steps closer to her, intruding her personal space just as she raises her hand to halt him, but with her timing her fingers have deftly slipped up his t-shirt, brushing his bare flesh.

One watcher can clearly see the couple and the brow raising display just now.

He murmurs something that makes her blush scarlet and he crookedly grins at her reaction. Consequently she drops her hand, flushing more.

**May 1, 2009**

She huffs out in irritation because the paper is fixated on speculation about her and Draco, tabloids fabricating stories that she can't believe were even published with doctored photos and some from a long time ago that nearly make her laugh. She nearly spits out her orange juice because one was taken from the Yule Ball and she nearly chokes on her bagel when she sees some horribly photo shopped pornographic shot. But of course, they've all sprinkled in photos from yesterday when he came over per her request because she was worried that these scoundrels would invade the kids' privacy.

She'd like to explicitly deny the allegations about them but she can't necessarily, not with how they interact around each other, as if she needed the pictures from yesterday to blatantly point that out to her.

She glances up guilty because there he sits with his coffee across the counter from her in his boxers and a t-shirt, a bagel out before him that she spread cream cheese on and sipping the coffee she brewed for him because she knew he'd swing back after sunset for dinner with the kids and he'd probably stay late that night, somehow he ended up in bed beside without anything intimate, it's just comfortable to sleep near each other. She knows that his earlier comment about staying at the Manor is trivial because it's far more like he's living here, though when she sends the kids to the Manor for a night with him, she finds herself there for dinner and staying later as well, though she isn't as bad as him with sleeping in bed together. She'd certainly like to say that they have boundaries, but this morning before breakfast when she was showering, he waltzed in to piss and then brush his teeth as if nothing was wrong, and maybe it's worse that she didn't do anything to ask him to leave, just greeted him good morning and didn't bother to turn around so her back was to him in the shower. But she's trying to justify it to herself that he's seen it all before, how else did they have two kids?

She glances away because she isn't sure she's ready to let him go. The nights when she returns back here with the kids at the Manor with him, she doesn't sleep and she realized this morning that she had missed his impromptu walk-ins to the bathroom. Yesterday she realized she missed his soft kisses and though he hasn't kissed her lips in a long time, she misses the warmth and softness of his lips. She's not ready for goodbye yet.

He can't look at her because as much as it feels like reconciliation is lingering in the shadows for them, he still can't tell her the truth that he had never been prescribed Lunesta and maybe it's more of a lie that he told her that he didn't need medicine anymore to sleep when he clearly waits until she's asleep before he pops a few to fall asleep. As guilty as he feels, he tells himself that he's an insomniac without it and he justifies it because his children need a father that's not crippled because he can't sleep. And if he tells her, what kind of man does he look like when he's afraid of what he'll see without it? If he has to admit that nothing has changed since his release and really his incarceration?

She's still trying to figure out where the fuck they went wrong and how she can fix the pieces of Humpty Dumpty—them.

Was their fault in trying to revisit things long since buried? Too many secrets? Turning blind eyes? Incarceration? Time? Maturity? Life?

She gravely exhales.

He isn't sure how he's supposed to fix this, before when they fought it was simple. It was the noose of incarceration that somehow kept them together even if it were by frays of a rope. Partially, they held the broken shards because they had a son together and at the time, they naively thought that the most vital thing in this world was raising him as a combined unit, cohesive, intertwined, but prison taught them otherwise. He's so lost without this noose hanging overhead because they've learned that they can raise their children without being together.


	32. Chapter 30

**Chapter 30: **

**June 5, 2009**

When he stirs awake, the bathroom door is ajar and he glides over to the bathroom, but doesn't bother to step into it as he silently watches her in her bra and knickers, her fingers tangled in her curls as she piles it all atop her head in some intricate design, but his eyes linger on the necklace dangling from her neck, the gift from long ago resting at the valley of her breasts, nestled beautifully. His throat constricts because a moment like this hasn't happened since her belly was swollen with their firstborn and she simply stood in nothing, unaware he was watching as her hands ghosted over her belly, but she's just as beautiful. His eyes find the faint stretch marks because it's a reminder that once it had been everything he thought eternity held for them and it's painful to think that was the past and their future is murky.

"I want another baby," the words tumble from his lips because truly he has no gravity to ask such a thing when they aren't even technically together with all these unspoken afflictions to their relationship, but they co-exist and revolve around each other as if they are because it's not a question if love is absent, they both know it isn't. It's more the ramifications if they do and where it leaves them in this tangled web they've already created.

The words of swift denial of why they could never fails to leave her mouth because she craves it infinitely more than he does and she knows just how tangled their web is, but look how far they've come with two children, what's another child to add to their increasing mess?

He capitalizes on her silence and swiftly his lips meld to her lips and his fingers fiddle with her bra strap as she hitches her legs around his waist, letting him guide her to where he was leading them.

It's years of sexual frustration and desperation and all this pent up sadness and anger and it's this loneliness and this grieving that finally unravels. It's rushed and clumsy and almost inexperienced but it's been ten years. But at the same time it's everything they need it to be—passionate and consuming.

His daughter sits perched in his lap as he pulls off the tissue paper of her gift, she's giggling already because her mother's idea for his birthday present and his breath catches when he sees the collage of images of them together: her sitting on his shoulders with her hands in his hair and his hands around her calves, a goodnight kiss, his hands at her belly tickling her, her curled up to him on the couch. Blocks with stamped letters in all the colors of the rainbow spell out, _I Love You Daddy_, and it hangs just above the collage near his neck. When he turns to the back he laughs because there is a huge blown up image of two clownfish that he presumes to be Nemo and his Daddy and in loopy blue scrawl beneath the fish, _Deeper than the Ocean. _He has the biggest smile gracing his face because he couldn't agree more that this is certainly a treasured gift he will wear proudly out and about; his smile grows as he kisses his daughter and she happily clings to him, throwing her arms around his neck because she has made her father so happy.

But his son's gift nearly brings him to tears as he opens this little storybook about Power Rangers and him saving the day because as innocent it is and how little son really knows about everything, it's completely his story that he's positive Hermione helped craft for this sole purpose. But he smiles when he sees his son appear and he laughs at the figurine of the Boy Who Lived and Blaise and he can't help but chuckle at that or even the wild curls of his daughter when she appears or Hermione when she does. He kisses his son's forehead as his son shyly smiles, and his son is pressed up against his side because his daughter is still on his lap, but it's more than okay because he has his two children here right now.

His thumb rubs swirls into her lower back as she slowly drifts into the land of dreams in his arms, but he's still wide awake haunted by his children's gifts that drift him back to his incarceration.

His spine nearly paralyzes him when he can vividly recall the oppressive white washed brick layers of his prison cell, the unforgiving cold metal bed, the hard relentless concrete at his feet, the large heavy door that shuts slowly, the little lift in the center of the door for his tray of slops to be delivered, the artificial light suffocated without warning, the haunting silence of the cell block, the guards' flashlight intruding in nightly inspections, the isolation, phrases censored in his letters, the handcuffs, the prodding searches of his body, the guards tearing through his cell, the freezing showers without privacy, and he remembers just how prison is soul draining even without the dementors.

He chokes out her name but she doesn't stir.

He untangles himself from her as he slips off to the bathroom.

He wrenches open the drawer and he plucks the orange bottle into his shaking hand.

_The alley's filthy but they, as fucked up as they are, could care less that they've stumbled here with this bottle of liquor all wrapped up in a brown paper bag. They've run into the depths of muggle London to where the grime and inner city rot away, where the children die young, where the fatherless rise, where the homeless sleep, where the addicts get high. _

_Lethargically he cranes his head to his darker friend and if they had been mere muggles, he knows that his friend could have easily been another one of these numbers the world lets rot. But they aren't. They're wizards and he's been branded with the Dark Mark and they've been thrust into this war when they haven't seen anything yet, when they haven't lived. They both don't speak their inevitable fate of rotting away because of this war, but they both know it and it's why they're here like this. _

"_If I wasn't high, I'd probably blow my brains out," the ebony one murmurs brokenly despite having never held a gun that these muggles kill each other with. _

_He doesn't tell off his friend for such a comment because he understands in some regards. _

His neck is bent backwards as he swallows the pills.

It's strange that for all the memories, it's the one from before sixth year he recalls in a time like this, but he brushes it off because he's not getting high and he's not considering suicide, he's simply using the medication as the doctor prescribed to take the pain out. But it's been long since the doctor prescribed him this medication when it expired long ago. Yet, here he stands still medicating himself without the consent of the doctor.

But a little voice, some might label it a guilty conscience, whispers but isn't this the same principle? Aren't you escaping pain? Aren't you abusing the whole concept of a doctor's prescription? If it's not, then why this secrecy—why do you hide them, why did you lie about your prescription, why do you wait for her to be asleep, why can't you stop?

There's a far more sinister voice that whispers back that he can stop and that it's best she remains ignorant to this because she has far more things to worry about than him.


	33. Chapter 31

**Chapter 31: **

**June 6, 2009**

"You're twenty-nine," there's a sadness in the inmate's words despite the genuine smile on Lucius Malfoy's weary face. His son has grown up since he can last remember all those years ago, but it's far more heart breaking that the last time he felt he genuinely smiled at his son was even longer, probably before the second war, but maybe even further back than that. But it's just as heartbreaking that he's spent all these years estranged and he can't seen to remember the point in time when his son grew distant from him because he knows it was far more than just his trial and incarceration. His son is twenty-nine and he doesn't know how many years of those he was truly a father to his only son, his only child.

The son painfully nods along because he's thinking that for all these years he's breathed in oxygen and his heart has been pumping, he's spent a third of it behind bars and he hasn't been in his children's lives for just as long as the father he had wanted to be when his son was still in the womb. He was a father at eighteen and incarcerated within months and he didn't leave prison until he was twenty-eight years old when his children had already learned to live a life without him and soon they'll be off to Hogwarts and he won't hardly see them ever again.

"I feel old," the elder hoarsely jokes, "when I have a son nearly thirty and two grandchildren, one nearly eleven and another almost ten."

There's no chuckle or shared laugh or even a smile.

"Prison does that," the younger murmurs and they both understand.

"I heard what Harry Potter did for your trial," the father softly whispers because the name itself is strange to say after all these years but maybe it's far more alien to feel grateful that the boy saved his son from rotting away in a cell beside him for his life.

There are days when he is thankful that he only had to serve ten years incarcerated but there are days when he loathes Harry Potter for allowing him to be released after ten years because no man can ever return to society as he left it after that long. There are days he hates he was sentenced ten years because he missed his children's childhoods but not enough to completely miss them but it's just enough for him to see the scars he's inflicted on them.

"He did it because of Koi and Hermione."

It's a quick end to any further discussion of prison that he wants to elude and he knows the mere subject of the mudblood he impregnated will deter his father.

There's nothing the inmate can argue about that because he knows the history of his son and the Potter boy.

"How are they?"

He knows his father isn't asking about the mudblood.

"He's so excited to go to Hogwarts," he says, but he omits how they're still healing the rift between them and he doesn't speak of how there are days when he thinks his son wants to leave everything behind to go to school to leave behind the estranged father and his mother's tears and his sister's naivety. "He's been practicing on his broomstick for a long time," he leaves out that Potter and Blaise taught him, "as a Seeker. He's quite natural at it. He's perceptive," and he leaves out that his son has seen far too many things he hasn't wanted him to see, "Smart, you know. Don't know what house he'll be in though, there are days when I'm sure Slytherin, but there are days when I say that he'll be like his mother." He stops because he's brought up the mudblood and he doesn't know how to continue before he starts to hear a slew of derogative comments about her and her kind.

But his father doesn't, just smiles because he's far too enraptured with a grandson he hardly knows.

"Rose, she's beautiful and she's so loving," he whispers, leaving out that she's far too much like her mother in some regards, "Her heart just grows and grows," he leaves out that there are days he's afraid because she's too much like her mother and he doesn't want her falling in love with some boy like him, "and she's so kind, so generous, so giving, so selfless." He leaves out his fear that she will follow her mother's footsteps. "I don't know which house she'll be in either."

"Their mother?" His father prods with a gentle smile still.

It's not necessarily a step to overcoming his prejudice of mudbloods, but he's trying to somehow understand his son and he knows how much she must mean to him.

"It's so messy," the son candidly murmurs and he's never been this frank about her before, but he wants advice from a man that is still married despite all the pain, "and there are so many cracks in our relationship that we created because we didn't realize the fallout of doing so."

"Draco, they never said that love was easy or kind."

He almost refutes his father because he's read the bible and he knows it said love was that, or something along those lines.

**June 8, 2009**

A smashed and bent cigarette lies, carnage of ashes spilling forth as the ember slowly suffocates.

"I'm not seventeen anymore," she susurrates, her eyes on the cigarette.

"I hope not," he shakily breathes out, but she doesn't laugh or smile.

"My mother always told me to not play with open cuts," she whispers, ignoring his futile attempt to assuage the heaviness of all the flaws in them.

His knees bend and somehow he finds the chair across from her and maybe it's because he knows where this is going and his heart has already been ripped from his chest at the idea of where this will end, he doesn't feel that he'll be able to stand when they finish.

"I can't spend the rest of my life with these cuts and clinging to some idea of love that a seventeen year old girl had or what the eighteen year old thought she had found either."

"Then why'd you wait for ten years?" He hisses it out through clenched teeth.

"I didn't think so much would change."

"I went to _prison_, did you expect me to come back the same eighteen year old that left?"

"I didn't know how many things we wouldn't tell each other," she hisses back.

There's a snide comment waiting on his tongue about how there are more she doesn't know about.

"You never wanted to know!"

"Who would fucking want to know how you plan to assassinate their headmaster, the man they respect and admire? Who would want to know all their crimes against mankind? Who would want to know how their lover betrays them at every turn by his allegiances?"

"Is that why you kept spreading your legs, then?"

"How could I forget I'm the Malfoy _whore_?"

He bites his tongue from telling her that she isn't—she's the mother of his children.

"Get the fuck out of my house," she sneers.

His fist cracks against the wood of the doorframe and his knuckles bruise, a resounding splinter of pain thrumming in his hand. He halts, not leaving the kitchen yet.

"Get out," it's more frantic because a hazy film of unbidden tears that threaten to spill down her cheeks coats her eyes.

With more force, it's probably more accurate to say anger, he punches the same spot again and his fist splinters off some wood, flesh torn by the shards of wood that have sliced the skin of his knuckles and the backs of his hand.


	34. Chapter 32

**Chapter 32:**

**July 7, 2009 **

There's a pile of dirty dishes sitting by her sink that she has yet to be bothered washing from the cake, wrapping paper is discarded in the living room still, red solo cups litter the house, streamers still hang from the doorframes, the balloons still sit in the corners, and the large sign that reads "Happy 11th Birthday, Koi!" is still hanging.

His fingers wrap tightly around the neck of a beer bottle that she had offered to the parents of her son's friends that had attended the party, rushing away as he arrived because things were strained between them and they've hardly exchanged words, just passing the children back and forth, and he was heading straight towards the cooler to grab a beer for him to nurse rather than have to force himself to play pretend with her that they were on friendly terms. She's glad he had his beer; it kept him occupied because she knows most of the parents were anxious with having an ex-felon and convicted Death Eater around their kids and she knows many were agitated to demonstrate their manners by conversing with the father of the birthday boy with polite conservation. But then again, it kept him distant from his son. Yet, she's somewhat pleased that he didn't bring that around their son because incarceration had been plenty to strain this fragile relationship already.

"You invited Boy Wonder," he hisses, bitter that the man threw his son up on his shoulders and ruffled his son's hair so carelessly as if he was the boy's father grates his nerves that while he was incarcerated, she hadn't left the role of a father void in his absence, but that she had tried to fill it with Potter. He's already jealous that the man has more memories with his son than he does—this was just more salt to the wound.

"Why wouldn't I?"

He hears the implied—_he's been more of a father than you ever have, he was there for every other birthday, he was there when you weren't. _

"Because I'm his father, not Saint Potter."

"I invited Blaise and he fucking called the man _daddy_."

The shards scatter across the tile at his feet from his fingers slipping on the neck and the bottle falling.

"Why the fuck didn't you correct him?"

"He needed a father for more than just a few visits and the godfather of your child was filling that fucking gap by trying to show him things I couldn't as a mother."

"God, I'm just a fucking sperm donor, aren't I? Any other man that wasn't fucking incarcerated for mistakes he made as a boy is fucking good enough for your son, isn't he? Did he call Weasley _Daddy_?"

"I didn't need to do fucking shit," she hisses, "He learned from a young age that Daddy wasn't around so he fucking went looking for one and he found it in your best friend."

"Potter never had to open his fucking mouth to say what happened on that Astronomy Tower and maybe Koi wouldn't be fucking calling other men _Daddy_."

"You don't think the other Death Eaters wouldn't have turned you in to save their skins," she bitterly laughs.

"Did you fuck Potter? Is that why he locked me up?"

"He's the one that fucking got you acquitted for Katie Bell and Ron when he knew you fucking did it because he knew you needed to be a father to Koi and you couldn't be locked up for life!"

"Did you fuck Potter, is that why you went off with him for seventh year when I offered for you to be hidden away from the war?"

"I went to help Harry track down horcruxes to defeat the Dark Lord that you were fucking serving."

"Did you fuck Potter?"

"He's my best friend."

"Did you fuck your _best friend_?"

"Why the fuck does it matter who I've fucked and who I haven't?"

"Answer the fucking question."

"I can't believe I ever fucked you."

"Did you forget who the fuck I was? Remember that I'm a Death Eater, Hermione. Remember how many times you let me fuck you with my Dark Mark."

"Forget whose pussy you were fucking, Death Eater? Aren't I a filthy mudblood that you fucked and knocked up twice? Didn't you betray the Dark Lord on more offenses than his most faithful have been convicted of?"

Brokenly, "Fuck you."

"Isn't that I how got here with you," she chokes out. She omits that it's more she loved him—loves him another part of her head corrects—that she ended up here.

**July 8, 2009**

"Would you have been happy with the Weasel instead," it's cracked as it leaves his tongue.

"He's my best friend, but I couldn't love him," she leaves out _like you_, "not like a husband, but I love him as much as I love Harry and that could have been enough."

"He would have been there for your children."

"You've been here," she meekly refutes.

"I have nothing else," he averts his gaze and he holds his tongue from telling her that prison took everything else from him, but she can hear it between his words.

"Neither do I."

Because as much as he's lost from prison, she lost from being a mother so young—she doesn't have a career, she just found a way to occupy her time with this program she's been slaving over with Harry—and she never found more friends outside of the ones she had because she's the Malfoy whore and how could they stoop that low to associate with the likes of her and she lost her partner when he was incarcerated and she's lost the family she wanted for her children.

"You had the Malfoy fortune," he futilely jokes, and he knows there's a comment to be made about gold diggers but he's so exhausted that he can't make that kind of comment about her because that's not her.

She breaths out, "Not the name."

He stiffens because that nearly sounded like she wished he had married her.

"You never wanted it."

"I wanted it when I was eighteen."

"You stopped as soon as I was incarcerated."

She shakes her head because even then, she wanted it, regardless.

"When'd you stop," his voice is gravelly.

She ignores that question because it's far too complicated to answer.

"Do you still…."

He doesn't know if he should ask if she wants to marry him or love him.

"I don't know."

**July 31, 2009**

It's odd that in his backyard, there stands the man he once denounced as a Death Eater but then he saved the man, and maybe it's odder that he's standing beside the girl who he's been best friends with since he saved her from a troll all those years ago and he thought they were estranged since an ugly fight, but somehow the two have come together for his birthday. He fixes his rounded glasses just to make sure he's clearly seeing them standing so close that their hips are touching.

They are far from reconciliation but it's a step.

It's complicated but they couldn't expect anything less when they're opening up scars that are ten years old, some almost twelve. And they're trying to close festering wounds before they scar.

But this time, it's not just for the sake of the children.


End file.
